When Apple comes to mind, it probably conjures images of slick, carefully engineered devices with innovative, envelope-pushing features. And the company’s surely had more than its fair share of those, but it’s also managed to pull off a subtler but far greater feat that goes underappreciated.
The company has not only figured out how to make us eat our vegetables—technologically speaking—but it’s also turned those very features into selling points. Because it’s one thing to sell a flashy, shiny device; it’s quite another to get people excited about the mundane necessities of the technology world.
Baby got backups
In fall 2007, I’d only recently started working at Macworld, and I was assigned to cover what was the biggest of big deals in those days: the launch of Apple’s latest version of Mac OS X, codenamed Leopard. As these were still the days where you had to get yourself a physical disc to install a new OS (and pay $129 for the privilege!), I hauled myself down to my local Apple Store in the Cambrideside Galleria. What I found was a decent length line of people all queued up to get their copies of the new OS.
