[jfengel]

The iPhone isn't spartan, but it does a great job of illustrating how Apple pares away features for a better user experience. Apple is famous for eliminating things that stun hackers: the disk drive, expandable memory, replaceable batteries, audio jacks. Slashdot famously pronounced the iPod "lame" for not having a bunch of things that a cheaper competitor offered, but Apple had zeroed in on exactly the things that people wanted. Their app store is much less open than Android's, but gives most people the things that they want.

Developers in particular seem to have a hard time remembering that most people don't want a product that can do anything. They want a product that does exactly the things that they want it to do and is optimized for those. Finding that sometimes requires a great leap of insight -- or faith.