However, if you look at Apple products from a rational techie point of view, they are very underpowered, ridiculously overpriced and very poor quality. They would be a questionable buy even if they were 80% discounted, that is unless you plan to resell them on ebay for more.
Quite an anomaly here. Why such a poor product succeeds as much as it does. The short answer is feelings.
We like to think that people are rational beings and make decision based on logic and facts. Such a view would be prevalent among the engineering and tech community as you do need these things together with math to actually make any product work at all. Thus, mostly logical and rational people succeed in engineering careers. including software engineering.
However, world is bigger than just engineering community. It has people who fail at math and sciences who nonetheless succeed in life based on other abilities such as emotional "intelligence", favoritism, cronyism, beauty and such.
Such people as well as those who promote or marry them clearly do not make their decision based on logic and facts. They make them based on either feelings or social reputation. I will analyze each of these parameters separately.
Social reputation is the idea that certain items signify your status in society. For example, in military there are chevrons, starts, bars and other such devices denote rank. One star general is below the 5 star one. These ranks and devices that represent them are coveted by people.
Some extrapolate this logic into civilian world and luxury item manufacturers make a lot of money on it by associating their brand with high social status, Rolex, Versace, Rolls Royse are an example.
To a certain extend Apple did tried to associate their brand with a social status. For example, these old ads of Mac vs PC were aimed at precisely that impression. These have not succeeded, but eventually they got there by other means.
Second and most important aspects is feelings. Feelings do seem rather simple on the surface: just because I like it. They see something, they love it and buy it. No thought process involved whatsoever. Sometimes people even buy things as expensive as cars for such superfluous reasons such as because its red, cool, pretty or has good vibes. Laptops or smartphones are much less expensive and important so such approach would be followed by more people in regard to their tech. It is because of people like that marketing departments exist and every so often invent various over the top ad campaign.
Sometimes emotional people later rationalize their decisions with some hastily combined arguments. Such arguments mislead people around them into thinking there are some rationales behind such decision when in fact there was none. It was an emotional decision.
However, what makes people like this or that and dislike something else is a rather tricky question. Many people as different as fiction writers, philosophers, astrologists, politicians and psychologists pondered over this question. So far biologists and psychologists have not produced a definitive mapping of the feelings compartment of human psyche, at least it's not publicly available.
Because there are no concrete set of rules for appealing to feelings, certain people with a knack or gift of getting such things often succeed in life or business. I do not know Steve Jobs personally so I cannot know if he reversed engineered feelings or just stumble upon the solution randomly, but whatever he did worked. However, if reverse engineered feelings do exist somewhere in Apple, value of this information is indeed high as it will all but guarantee business success.
In fact, I myself try to reverse-engineer feelings and become rich from that.
Tech world is crowded with companies that are run by rational tech savvy people who make sound rationally good tech products for equally tech savvy rational customers. In a world like that a company that appeals to feelings rather than logic would have no real competition for irrational emotional technically and mathematically illiterate casuals who buy based on feelings and emotions. Apple is such company. Apple's success made some of them try to imitate them in various ways in order to snatch at least part of their huge customer base.
However just imitating Apple design decisions will not guarantee success. Line of thinking that it's something in their usability or convenience is fundamentally wrong. There is nothing rational in what makes Apple as popular as it is.
All Apple success comes from such non-engineering things, such as marketing, design, presentation and vibe. Outer appearance over the substance.
Because of that one way to imitate Apple's success is to just take a sample of such illogical emotional Apple fans and just show them different design options to see what they like more.
The other is to reverse engineer feelings. To do this we need to take samples of what succeeds against any logical sense and try to figure out common patters behind these successful examples.
There is a lot of money to make by exploiting the stupid illogical people who do not think rationally. Apple's success is a proof of that. There are still a lot of room for more out of the box thinking tech companies who will manage to grasp illusive vibe that makes such people buy Apple products like hot cakes.
PS: Fundamentally emotional illiterates who cannot into math want to feel they are as savvy and advance as smart guys who actually get this stuff. Apple gives them feelings. The feeling. It does not offer then a choice that is actually smart. It only makes them feel they are making a smart choice. All Apple sells is an illusion (delusion) that their products are good. People buy into the delusion and refuse to wake up from it.
That is just one of the delusions, emotional people like to indulge.
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