Why people get excited about Apple products?

Thomas Fitzgerald writes in his blog about Apple design and why other companies refuse to understand the qualities that makes iPod and eventually iPhone successful. Electronics industry is focusing on features (this is also the case with Finnish cell phone maker Nokia), and so do most of the people that comment / analyze their products. No one does not seem to be willing to admit that huge amount of features are not what makes or breaks a gadget. Here’s my take what average people might actually care about:

1. User experience. Creating technology that doesn’t feel like technology. Most people associate with technology clumsy user experience and overall negative feelings when they remember the situation where they didn’t get things done or it was unnecessary difficult because they were not ableto understand the gadget. Stuff that Apple make, just feels like natural extension to your instincts.

When people use Apple products, and find that those actually respond to you the way you would expect, it feels like it’s a natural extension to yourself. You don’t need manual for iPod. Most importantly those gadgets don’t do anything unexpected. They start to trust those equipment, and this also brings other positive feelings towards those. They attach humane feelings with the gadgets. This is actually what people want; to feel that technology has some human qualities.

2. Harmony. Apple design has distinctive look and feel to it. When people begin to trust some technological gadget, they look for signals that really set them apart from other devices. In case of Apple, this is the simple and stylish, almost Zen feel to them. They clearly look like artifacts designed with someone with clear sense of style and harmony.

This extends also beyond shape. The marriage of software and hardware is one of the key aspects with success of Apple, as many people have noticed. I believe it is essential, that software and hardware is made by the same company. Extensible platform just complicates things, and creates an environment, where software that does not happen to possess those qualities that originally captured user might disrupt the user experience enough to shatter the “illusion”.

3. Magic. Last aspect is the most harder to describe, because it actually stems from our primitive instincts. Technology has in a way become almost religious aspect in our lives. We want to believe in things, and we want to be able to trust them. We want to have something in our possession, that seem to have some divine qualities in it; Harmonic impression created by simple, yet stylish design, and user experience, that makes it feel like extension to ourselves. We define ourselves by they things we own. The technology we choose makes us to experience the environment we live in a different way, in a way they “enhance us”. This is no different from wearing an amulet that you think will bring you fortune.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Famous words by Arthur C. Clarke. That’s the way we _want_ the gadget to appear, magical.