It can be hard at times to come up with a sound byte that really explains why it is that apple does so well at design, and why they succeed doing things in markets that are well saturated already with lots of good products.

I was reminded of the famous quote at lunchtime from Apples leader for life, Steve Jobs where he said that the main reason apple does well is due to it’s sense of style. Apple doesn’t necessarily do things that other companies couldn’t do, rather it just does them in a more pleasing way.

Take the iPhone for instance. The product is demonstrably worse than everything else on the market. Geeks decry that it doesn’t have the right features or that the features it does have are not implemented right.

Yet still, the iPhone sells well and there are entire industries springing up around it. What is it, exactly, that they got right? Let me give you a specific example.

The iPhone was possibly the first to use a glass capacitove touchscreen as it’s only input device, along with the use case that the device should be able to be turned 90 degrees for landscape use. This poses a unique problem, as most glass when looked at when wearing polarized sunglasses will become opaque.

So, apple cuts the glass on a 45 degree slant, so that from both angles, the screen is transparent. An apple engineer somewhere realized this woul be a problem and had the manufacturing tweaked to account for it.

It’s little touches like that, that give you an idea of the level of attention to detail there.

Maybe other companies would get that right first time, I don’t know. But I think this is just one example where apple gets it right. It’s just a matter of style.