Steve Jobs's real genius

In his quasi-review of Walter Isaacson's new biography of Jobs, Malcolm Gladwell examines the role of tweaking in innovation:

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

Even to an outsider, it is clear that this has been the secret to Apple's enormous success over the years, particularly since Jobs's return in 1997. Small things make a huge difference. Whenever people attempt to compare, for example, the iPhone with an Android device, the discussion will inevitably come down to what the user values in a phone.

You can reel off a list of impressive technical specifications all you wish, but as is the case with most Apple products, what people see in them is a little more abstract; the appeal of their products cannot be distilled to mere numbers. The little things really do matter: the tweaking paid off.