Apple is not about "polish" or "design"

In The Guardian you can read yet a description of what supposedly sets Apple apart from the competition. Now these descriptions have a tendency to talk about Apple's advantage as one of "polish", "design" and stuff like that. This is is not what Apple is about. Any organisation can put "polish" or "design" on their products, these concepts are superficial, polish even so by definition.

The success of Apple is about user interface design principles, among which one is that people prefer to see, recognize and act, than to remember and type, and I believe Apple's succes is also even more about how they view people.

The Apple philosophy is to view human individuals as fundamentally creative people, who want to do creative things. I do not have the books at hand but I believe this view of the individual is explicitly spelled out (or used to be) in their user interface design guidelines.

Competitors can put as much spit and polish on their products as they want, they still don't get the deeper meaning it seems. Apple's philosophy also helps them retain and motivate talented developers.

 "It is not as though Apple invented a totally new technology," says Adam Leach, principal analyst at consultancy Ovum. "What they did was re-think the whole mobile experience and produce a very polished experience compared with what people were used to."