Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky Page A

invoke.”
    Obsessing over details and bringing a Buddhist level of focus to a narrow assortment of offerings sets Apple apart from its competitors. Buddhism—a faith Jobs studied intensely—teaches that if you are going to prepare a cup of tea, the making of the cup of tea should command all your attention; even this insignificant task should be completed with all the mastery you can bring to it. It’s a seemingly goofy spiritual idea that can pay great dividends in the corporate world. Well-designed products provide their manufacturers with enviable benefits internally and externally. Internally, talent and resources flow to the products that the company does best.
    Externally, good design subliminally telegraphs to consumers that the manufacturer cares about them. This, in turn, creates a bond between brand and consumer that transcends price points.
I can’t wait to get the new iPad
versus
Which is a better deal, a Kindle or a Nook?
So how does Apple use focus to set itself apart when it comes to design, manufacturing, and corporate planning?
    Evoking a
feeling
is an extraordinary act for a device maker, let alone a packaging designer working for a device maker. (Try to imagine a Dell laptop evoking a feeling of any kind, other than frustration.) Yet it is what Steve Jobsdid at Apple from the day he started the company. Jobs refused to think ofant to thi Apple’s devices in a conventional way. They weren’t gadgets; they were works of art. “I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them,” he said in a 1995 interview for the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program Oral History Project. Jobs was referring to the people he had hired at Apple in its early days. Their goal, he said, was

putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. If you study these people a little bit more what you’ll find is that in this particular time, in the 70s and the 80s, the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. Almost all of them were musicians. A lot of them were poets on the side. They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter.

    In retrospect, it seems almost hubristic for Jobs to have compared computer designers—or, heaven forbid,
cardboard-box
designers—to artists. It’s yet another topic that would seem a bit hokey, or even fringe, if the backdrop were some other company. When an approach to creating gadgets enters the cultural zeitgeist, however,and when awareness of that approach leads to customers snapping up so much product that the company in question blossoms into the most richly valued company in the world, the poetry of consumer electronics rises to the stature of its circuitry.
    Apple is different, and what always has set Apple apart is its approach to products. Whether Jobs was describing the typical early Apple employee or merely talking elliptically about himself, Apple fashioned itself early on as a renegade. In the early days, Jobs famously flew a pirate’s skull-and-crossbones banner above the building that housed the Macintosh team, which he oversaw. From the beginning, Apple stood apart from the rest of the computer industry. The ethos at Apple was always about its uniqueness, and attention to detail is part of that ethos.
    The computer industry was about standardization. “Clones” of IBM PCs were one of the industry’s great innovations. Apple, with its devotion to superior computers, was briefly an icon, but mostly it was a niche player. Years later, when Hewlett-Packard was enduring one of its many crises, a