IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you

IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you can tell from the first moment that they care about even this part of the product life. It’s only 5 minutes and yet someone has clearly spent time on it. That carries through to the integration of hardware and software in the products. That doesn’t mean Apple is the best at either hardware or software. IMO, there are companies that do just as well or better at either of those things. But Apple does whole product design better than anyone. That is something that is very difficult to add to an organization that doesn’t understand it. IMO, it really started for Apple with Steve Jobs and being the founder, he was able to drive that into the culture. But it wasn’t there even for them at the start. IMO, it really got going when Steve returned the second time and drove products like iMac and iPod.