David Pearce

This is the sort of eternal struggle of any designer is you build something that people like and gravitate to, and it becomes sufficiently popular that it actually becomes almost impossible to change.

And so you either have to do what like Google does, which is just endlessly try to invent new things that mostly don't take off.

Or you just kind of let the thing slowly atrophy over time because you don't want to screw up people's workflows.

Beauty of that is neither of those is the correct answer.

And almost nobody is good at figuring out how to sort of slowly move people in the right direction without feeling like you're constantly making people learn new things.

And I think this is true with all kinds of software.

It's true with all kinds of gadgets.

Basically, once we as a consumer society land on an idea that works, even if it's not the best idea, it's just something that works and we get comfortable with it, changing that thing becomes very, very hard.

So that's all one thing.

The other thing, and this is the thing people have told me many times, is it's much cheaper to make fewer things than it is to make more things, right?

So if you're Apple, again, just to keep picking on the MacBook, you can make...

a bunch of different kinds of MacBook in roughly the same way with tiny little tweaks to your process and tooling pretty inexpensively, right?

You have this incredible economy of scale that allows you to make tons and tons of these things.

And if you want to make a Neo and all you're changing is like the color and a little bit of the size and a couple of parts, you don't have to like spin up new factories and invent new tools and teach people how to do tons of new things.

You just drop a couple of new changes to the process and

you're off and running with a new thing.

Whereas if you want to invent an entirely new gadget category or reinvent the way a laptop works entirely, that's going to be enormously expensive, like literally in dollars expensive to change your whole manufacturing process.

You have to change the packaging process.

You have to change the how things like move on trucks and how they fit into things.

Like think about all the times Apple has redesigned the Mac Pro