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It isn’t recent.

The only thing that has changed are some numbers. Some big numbers: largest company in the world, second most profitable company in the world, most profitable retail stores in the world, best-selling smart phone, second best-selling smart phone, best-selling tablet computer, etc.

Other numbers have not changed: customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, consumer ratings, etc.

So now we have some new numbers which make it easy to say “Apple is better.” But Apple has not changed. Apple is operating from the same principles, discipline, vision, and methods that they have always (with Steve and team) been operating from. What people who understand have been saying is no more true now than it was ten years ago: Apple is better. Not in trivial, transient ways. Not in the “My beliefs are right, yours are wrong” sense. Apple is doing, and has been doing, things much differently than any company—in any industry—for at least the past ten years. Apple’s products and operations are vastly superior. Many people have recognized this all along. Some people will never recognize it.

It’s just now all the numbers confirm it.

One of the best examples of Apple’s design craftiness is the just-opened 4th Street (N. Calif.) store, where the new sidewalk, store window panels and inside stone floor tiles all are dimensioned and positioned to present a symmetrical appearance. In this case, the master element is the stone floor tiles, which are 76 centimeters square (about 30 inches). The glass window panes are then manufactured to a multiple of that dimension. Outside, Apple routinely installs a new sidewalk in front of its street-facing stores. In this case, the sidewalk was made with contraction lines that are also multiple of the stone tile dimension. When all the painstaking design and construction work is finished, passersby and store visitors “see” the effect, but probably don’t realize why the store is so attractive.

I’ll be honest with you, I never understood what “workflow” means. I don’t go through steps of things to do while designing. I just sit down and start drawing in Photoshop. It’s almost like molding clay. You just have to start molding and fleshing out icons and UI design by doing. I draw fast enough in Photoshop that I don’t sketch, make wireframes, or preliminary work. I mostly just jump right in and create things.

This came up again and again in interviews, and it was difficult for me to answer honestly without coming off as lazy or arrogant. But honestly? I don’t do sketches, thumbnails, wireframes, or anything like that. In the case of web design, I often even skip Photoshop. One of the things I hated about school was how often I was forced to “reverse engineer” my final products into preliminary stages in order to fit into some predefined “workflow” that had no relation to how I actually worked.

Anyway, I just wish I had said it as well as Louie.

Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.

I will finish this. I will eat… ALL OF THE THINGS.

I could listen to the first two minutes of this forever.

Also, pretty.

Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.