I literally do not own one apple product, I've had a couple ipods and two iphones, but I'm all android and windows these days. So now that I've gotten the fanboy bullshit out of the way, I still can't believe people don't get why apple is popular. Sure status has something to do with it, they use great materials, the devices look quality, and they charge a premium which gives you status because you can afford it.

But IMHO the thing Apple does best, what made them what they are today, is usability and attention to detail. My dad doesn't give a fuck if a phone does 1000 different things pretty well, if it has the new voodoo 6000 transfer rate, or it allows you to send songs to your buddy saying the magic word, or even cut and paste. He just wants the few things it does do to be extremely intuitive and simple, and work every time the way it's supposed to.

Companies tried to put out tablets for years and they didn't sell to the masses. Geeks, myself included, would be in the forums talking about how x tablet had this much processing power, this much ram, some cutting edge features that the other one didn't have, a detachable/flip/fold/whatever keyboard. But they don't realize they aren't the average consumer. The average consumer doesn't give a flying fuck about that stuff. They want it to be simple, they want it to work every time, they want the battery to last a long time, they don't want to have to deal with a bunch of confusing options, they want it to be aesthetically pleasing. Stop adding new stuff until you perfect every last detail of the stuff you already have, and remove the stuff that most people aren't going to use.

I should stop this rant about now but I just remembered a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I switched over to a Note III over a year ago, I really enjoy it and for me it's better than an iPhone. But the first week I had the phone I pressed the button on my headphones to voicedial and as soon as it gave me the prompt I said call XXX and then nothing happened. Tried it again, call XXX, nothing happened. So I take the phone out of my pocket and realize when you activate voice dialing it unlocks the screen. The phone is in my fucking pocket, so unlocking the screen means my leg then operates the screen. You know, so it might press the voice dialing button again to cancel (which is what normally happens) or it might just pull up your ex girlfriends phone number and dial it, or text one of my clients "asdfasdfuxcjssssssssssssssssssss" or who fucking knows what else. It blew my goddamn mind that a company as big as Samsung didn't have a product tester say, "hey guys uh, phone unlocking might be a problem since people tend to use voicedialing when the phone is in their pocket." I can just hear Steve Jobs yelling at some dev team about how ridiculous that is, that's what he was good at - details.