Thoughts on Apple

I’ve been meaning to write this post sometime now, but I didn’t find the time to do it. Apple is a remarkable company — it went from oblivion to surpassing Microsoft’s market capitalisation, mostly due to the guidance of its CEO, Steve Jobs. However, what makes Apple significant is not their cash flow, nor its stock price (although this is an important factor when it comes to other things). What makes Apple significant its their ability to innovate and deliver amazing, polished products to the market.

First, take a look at the contraction quality of their computer hardware. The MacBooks have been remarkable machines, right from the beginning. My first Mac was a 1st-gen Macbook Pro, the first Intel machines that came out from Apple. When I held that laptop in my hands, and felt the sturdiness of the hardware, the great feeling of the aluminium I thought to myself “Wow, what the hell I was using before?”. You can’t even compare Macbooks with Dell/HP and others when it comes to build quality and beauty.

Then comes the OS. The remarkable Mac OS X. All of my life I grew up cursing Windows and their bluescreens. At some point, I also switched to Linux, but the hardware integration was so terrible, that it was even worse than the bluescreens. The difference between Apple and Microsoft when delivering new versions of the Operating System is that Apple introduces new features in the OS, like spotlight, Expose and so on, whereas Microsoft, most of the times, they just change the icons (see Windows 98 to ME, or 2000 to XP). People isn’t just looking at the icons, as it seems, they also care whats going on beyond that. Their OS is so well integrated with the hardware, that when you think about Windows it feels like a nightmare (n.b. I do not know if the situation with Windows 7 improved this area). You don’t get that with any other vendor.

With Apple’s entrance into the mobile market, lots of people came to criticise the company and how it handled the delivery of new features, both in hardware and in the OS. To me, the iPhone was the best phone I ever had. The huge gallery of applications, the multitouch, the best mobile browser and the excellent integration of other sensors in the interface (accelerometers etc.) is simply amazing. Let me ask you this: how do you browse the internet with your Blackberry phone? Still on WAP-alike pages eh? How about applications? Thought so. Sometimes I hear stupid arguments about competitor’s features like: well, my Nokia had multitasking 4 years ago. Well, how slow your phone was when you had 2 applications running? Now I think of it, what kind of applications you used to run back then? Or they compare Blackberry’s battery life with the iPhone’s. The only thing that your blackberry does through out your day is receive emails in a crappy mail client, you can’t do anything more on that thing. You can’t even browse the web on that thing (future browsers they may release will be considered when they release them). Let alone the smaller touch-less screen.

Having multi-tasking on small, embedded devices is a really hard thing to do. Hard, not because of the technology to multitask applications, but how to do implement it in a way that won’t suck up memory and make everything slower. Android and iOS 4 does this correctly. The rest implementations are just lazy and bad. I won’t go on and comment on their new brilliant display, neither the inclusion of a bunch of new sensors in the phone. And yes, I also know about the 3G video calling feature that many phones had from 4-5 years ago. But, have you ever tried video calling? *IF* it works, the quality is simply terrible. The video is continuously breaking and its low-res. Of course, iPhone 4 quality remains to be seen, but if it is the same as the one they showed in the presentation its going to be amazing. Nothing compared to what we ever seen before in a commercial phone.

Finally, the best thing about Apple, is when they deliver a new feature, it is actually working, the way it was supposed to be. It might not be as advanced as we would like (see the camera app, it just gained digital zoom in the latest iteration of the OS), but at least it works properly. To me, working according to specs is more important than breaking occasionaly and delivering “some more” advanced features.

Apple makes mistakes as well, everybody does. But that doesn’t stop their products from being awesome.