I feel my point still stands, and that video is reasonable evidence for it. Of course they think about what customers want and would buy when building products.

I feel my point still stands, and that video is reasonable evidence for it. Of course they think about what customers want and would buy when building products. But the difference between Apple and many other product organizations is, are they meeting customers where customers are at, or are they building for their own internalized notion of "yeah, this is how musicians should make music"? Apple has always been the latter; this is an extreme characterization of what I just said, because its probably not entirely true, but in a way they think about what customers would want without ever talking to one. And they've been eerily good at it for many years; its only recently that this strategy has stopped working. Tim Cook's Apple, especially post-2020, has embodied a strange synthesis of both models of product development. Apple Vision Pro is the purest example of this: AVP's sales numbers have been startlingly bad, and anyone with a brain in bizdev at Apple could have estimated the Meta Quest sales numbers and extrapolated to the conclusion that this market isn't chomping at the bit for Apple to release something. So: They made it because they thought it was cool. They made it because they had the technology; they maybe exclusively are the only company on the planet that could have made Apple Vision Pro. But no one talked to a customer, because there was never any "ideal customer profile" for AVP.