Closer to God
Apple has always found inspiration from others (Latin for stealing
ideas). The sector that has inspired Apple’s modern-day strategy is the
luxury industry. Apple decided to pursue scarcity to achieve outsized,
irrational profits that are nearly impossible for new-money, gauche
tech hardware brands to imitate. The Cupertino firm controls 14.5
percent of the smartphone market, but captures 79 percent of global
smartphone profits (2016).^11
Steve Jobs instinctively understood this. Attendees at the 1977
Western Computer Conference in San Francisco registered the
difference the instant they walked into Brooks Hall: while all other
new personal computer companies were offering stripped-out
motherboards or ugly metal boxes, Jobs and Woz sat at their table
behind the tan injected-plastic Apple II computers that would define
the elegant Apple look. The Apple computers were beautiful; they were
elegant. Most of all, in a world of hackers and gearheads, Apple’s
products bespoke luxury.
Luxury is not an externality; it’s in our genes. It combines our
instinctive need to transcend the human condition and feel closer to
divine perfection, with our desire to be more attractive to potential
mates. For millennia, we’ve knelt in churches, mosques, and temples,
looked around and thought, “There is no way human hands could have
created Reims/Hagia Sophia/Pantheon/Karnak. No way mere humans
could have created this alchemy of sound, art, and architecture
without divine inspiration. Listen to how transcendent the music is.
That statue, those frescoes, these marble walls. I’m taken out of the
ordinary world. This must be where God lives.”