Great insight from John Gruber. While we all can see and appreciate Apple’s design — it’s what we don’t see that actually gives them their bigger competitive advantage: manufacturing and scale. 

Apple has slowly been perfecting this over time. And newly minted CEO Tim Cook has undoubtedly been the key to this. Now that Apple has grown into a massive consumer electronics company, we’re really seeing the benefits reflected in their business. 

It starts with design, it ends with the actual build process. But the two are intertwined. Because of one, no one can match the other.