[wernercd]

As much as I love hating on Apple as much as the next person... they have developed taking products (iPod, iPhone especially) - and turning them into fairly polished products - into an art.

I'd get my mom and iPhone/iPad before I got her an Android/Tablet.

It's that simplicity that "ordinary" people gravitate towards - which I, as a power user, hate.

You could argue that Android/Windows gives more power to the user - but Apple makes better "appliances" than anyone else. Appliances don't get tweaked or twiddled with.

[danudey]

I think the better way to look at it is that Apple doesn't produce gadgets to appeal to early adopters, they produce gadgets to appeal to everyone and get early adopters to try it.

There were lots of MP3 players before the iPod, and they all had lots of features, most of which were terrible and confusing. No one had made an MP3 player to appeal to the mass market, they were designing them for the existing users of MP3 players, the early adopters.

Along came Apple and designed a device that everyone could want and use, and a lot of the early adopters saw that it was a superior product in a lot of ways. After that they iterated on it to improve it and make it more appealing to more and more people.

I agree with your sentiment that Android, Windows, and, I assume you would agree, Linux, provide more customization options to the user, and there's a huge part of me that loves being able to tweak things to work exactly right. I bought a Mac to replace my Dell, however, because I was tired of having to tweak things to work exactly right and I was happy to invest in a known quantity. There's nothing empowering about a system you have to work to maintain constantly. That's the appeal with Apple's products.

[Spooky23]

Don't forget the "rip. Mix. Burn." Marketing campaign that mainstreamed cd ripping and that Pepsi giveaway of music.