I think part of Apple's success (repeating a story I told elsewhere on HN, about an Apple exec who used to be a core Smalltalker at Xerox PARC) is that they've

I think part of Apple's success (repeating a story I told elsewhere on HN, about an Apple exec who used to be a core Smalltalker at Xerox PARC) is that they've organically grown a killer, but slightly oddball set of tools that work together very well as a whole. (Objective-C and Cocoa.) Looked at from the outside, the language oddities (a static, low-level language like C with a very Smalltalk-like flexible runtime system plus the minimum syntax for Smalltalk-style message invocation) are quite off-putting. It's not until you get inside and really use the system that you can appreciate how well it works. So people usually just "stay away" unless they really want to get into that particular ecosystem for other reasons (now it's market size for the iPhone; before, it was the cleaner & more compelling Mac OS software niche). Again, it's not any one particular feature (though most of the individual features are enablers, and can't be dropped), but the overall gestalt that is so (er, can't use "synergistic", I've already used "compelling", how about) coherent. Cocoa (Foundation and AppKit), and now CocoaTouch, are exceedingly well-crafted, powerful, dynamic-language frameworks that have evolved organically for over 20 years, starting from the NeXT days. The secret star behind this secret weapon is Ali Ozer, who's had a strong hand on the frameworks' tiller since the beginning, and who's still there. So, just as Steve Jobs has a singular vision which keeps their hardware efforts focussed, Ali (& his crew, now with a lot of momentum and shared "taste" after all this time) have the same focus at the software framework level.