Lessons on humility from… Apple
It’s impossible to understand their success otherwise
Why is Apple so successful and their products so popular?
The common narrative around this question is some version of “Apple customers are sheep” or “Because people will buy anything with an Apple logo on it,” or “Because people want to be cool, and Apple has a cool brand.” All nice, tidy answers, and all misguided. Because underneath them all is an unspoken but flawed assumption: the assumption that most people are stupid.
It’s an assumption that permeates everything from politics (“most voters are ignorant”) to the arts (“the average person has no taste to speak of”). And it’s somehow come to be a widely accepted narrative about the world’s biggest company. But it’s a narrative that couldn’t be more wrong.
As I will argue here, right at the root of Apple’s success is a profound respect for the reality of the ordinary person.
I can almost see the eye-rolling begin. It might help to explain how I got here.
The question that led me to becoming an Apple fan
I used to hate Apple with the best of them. I really did. This was back in the iPod days and continued for years after the 2007 launch of the iPhone. I bought…
