Why we Apple

How Apple wins people over

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Big companies are like sausage factories: you might enjoy the product, but you really don’t want to think about how it’s made. The corporations we encounter in a typical week are faceless and sometimes shameless, churning out will-this-do tat, enriching shareholders, treating their workers badly and doing their very best to avoid paying any tax.

Not Apple. Well, the EU might disagree on the tax bit.

To say that Apple isn’t like other companies would be an enormous understatement. Where other corporations are loathed, Apple is loved. Why is that? What makes Apple different?

The C word

Whenever someone wants to disparage Apple fans, they’ll usually call them a cult. It’s technically true – a cult can mean something that’s popular or fashionable – but that’s not the way it’s meant. It’s used in the sense of religious cults, to conjure up images of brainwashed hippies unquestioningly following the dubious instructions of some self-appointed saint. All while listening to really bad music.

Apple fandom is nothing like that. The miracles Apple fans seek are tangible feats of engineering excellence, even if – as in the case of the Mac Pro – those feats sometimes take a while to manifest themselves in Apple Stores. To love Apple isn’t to love overhyped products that hardly anybody will ever buy – cough Samsung Galaxy Note Edge! cough – it’s about knowing that the “beautiful”, “magical”, “amazing” device Tim Cook is waving about on stage will soon be on your desk, under your HDTV, in your pocket or on your wrist.

Apple uses lots of superlatives to describe its products, but they’re often deserved. To understand why people love Apple so much, we need to understand what it is that makes Apple’s products so different.

We can explain it in a word. Delight.

Clunks and thunks

Luxury car manufacturers put a lot of effort into making doors feel and sound right: a car that doesn’t suffer from NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) and has doors that shut with a satisfying thunk makes the owner feel happy and pleased with their purchase whenever they use it. ‘This is a quality car,’ they might