The work of the first iPhone team including Jony Ive might fit into Apple's philosophy, but those individuals deserve so much credit for Apple's small-device turnaround because iPhone wasn't inevitable and neither was Apple's recent success. Apple actually struggled for years in the personal computer market, made lots of now-forgotten stinker products with huge flaws, and mostly just continued to sell computers to a fanatical but tiny following. For example: yes, certainly I'll drag my floppy disk to the trash when I'm done working with it because there is no eject button, that sounds safe enough not to think about. What? To Apple's hardcore fans, that was always intuitive, and it does remove an ugly button from the front, but it is not "usable." It's just characteristic Apple. Apple never had a monopoly on usability.
Its main selling point of the day (besides visual voice mail) was that it could hook into the existing ITMS infrastructure without the limitations that their previous cooperation with Motorola was saddled with.
Back when it launched, all but the highest capacity iPods were competing with cheaper and cheaper featurephones packing more and more storage.
The press was basically screaming for Apple to get a phone out the door or go down in flames.
I think the biggest turnaround for Apple was when they got Jobs off the "tech hub" idea he was riding. The idea that the Mac would the center of "your" (his) technological life.
This turned the company from a computer company into a consumer electronics company.
Their keyboards and mice particularly showcase this: they look pretty and sleek, but try using them all day, and then try using a regular keyboard and mouse. They weren't thinking about the human who has to use it, they were thinking of appeal and looks.
You're not wrong about the approachability of IOS; that's no accident, and required a good deal of thought and attention. But I think whenever there is a tie, and they can either improve the aesthetics or improve the usability, they lean towards the former, because it's sexier and will sell.
Having done this, I prefer the Apple products:
1. The keyboards have very little travel so it is considerably less effort to type on them then to type on a standard keyboard.
2. The Magic Mouse has a large multitouch surface on it that enables gestures that I have a hard time going without. Also, it fits my hand. YMMV.
but, still; matter of taste. there will always be lovers and haters, and you're certainly welcome to prefer one over the other.
Sure, they make mistakes. Probably quite a number of them. Nobody is perfect. But I'd say their mistakes are insignificant compared to their achievements.
Plus, sometimes they're not mistakes; they just don't target power users. A single-button mouse is an example of that. And to some extent choosing aesthetics over usability can be an example of this too. A non-tech person might prefer a pretty mouse and keyboard because he only checks his email occasionally and he's not a great typist anyways.
(mind, I do realize Apple often did not 'invent' these things. They just were clever enough to polish these things up and productize them, which rather bafflingly few companies did before them)
Here it is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Apple_iM...
Not surprised that developers would start on the wrong end, but I wonder what Apple could've done to get them to start with glances. Perhaps not even include app support in v1 of the Watch OS.
Because every last TV ad Apple ran for years were "here is how you get to map/music/web" under the guise of "see how simple iPhone is to use".
I strongly disagree with you there. In fact, I'd say the exact opposite.
The experience of using the product has always been at the very core of Apple's design philosophy. The entire desktop metaphor, include the Trash, the files in folders, etc. is about simplifying the user experience with the computer.
The fact that anyone can just pick up an iPhone and pretty much immediately know what they should be doing, without reading a manual, tells you exactly that usability has been so thought out that it has become invisible. You just do what you want to do, without having to think about how to do it. So, it's the embodiment of the Steve Krug "Don't make me think" mindset: usability is design.