The iPad 2: Closed Loops & Cool Engineering

Yesterday the iPad 2 was announced. Maybe you’ve heard?

One of the many things that struck me as I watched the announcement of the iPad 2 was the fact that the iPad is now thinner than an iPhone 4. In fact, when I look at the iPad 2 side on it reminds me of an iPod Touch, which is just thick enough to avoid melting into thin air — and no thicker.

So: a faster processor, good battery life, cameras, and a thinner body. Apple are very good at engineering.

Apple’s strength, though, isn’t just that the company is good at engineering: it’s that they get to be good at engineering for a device that runs their own software. I think a lot of people overlook this when they praise Apple’s designs: iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs wouldn’t look anywhere near as nice if they had to accommodate a third-party OS. On Android, the iPad’s Smart Cover would be a third party accessory: can you imagine an third party cover which caused an Android tablet to go into standby, automatically, when the cover was closed?

Apple engineers operate in a closed loop: their hardware and software can work hand in hand because that hardware and software is developed hand in hand. The effortless, cool design of Apple devices isn’t an accident, and it’s not just down to the luck of having Jonathon Ive on board: it’s the result of a very intelligent business decision. That decision? Hardware and software which work together should be developed together.

Android — Apple’s most obvious competitor — operates in an open loop. Google develop the software: manufacturers develop the hardware. This isn’t to say that Android is in anyway a failure (although I don’t think it’s as good as iOS), but look at it this way: at Apple, the hardware and software guys work in the same building. Android hardware and software developers might work on different continents. How can you get the same level of feedback and cooperation when your software developer works for a different company, in a different office, in a different timezone?

Like I said up in paragraph four, the iPad 2 Smart Cover is a great example of this. There’s no way that any combination of separate hardware and software companies could come up with anything like the level of integration found in the cover’s design: it looks simple, but it’s not. You can imagine long hours of conversation between Apple’s designers and developers about exactly how the cover would work: what strength should the magnets be? How sensitive should the auto-sleep feature be? (Should the iPad go to sleep as soon as the cover is closed, or should it wait for a second or two, to make sure that the user “meant” to close the cover?). Those aren’t conversations that Samsung is having with Google.

All of which brings me on to the most important thing: culture.

There’s no doubt that Apple engineers and developers share a common culture, and that’s only possible in a closed loop. Open loop systems, like Android and Windows, don’t get to develop a shared culture because they don’t have enough to share. Windows has been dominant in the OS market for over twenty years, and in all that time we’ve never — not once — seen anything that even begins to quality for the description “Windows iPad”.

Not all closed-loop systems work. Nokia has proved this in the past few years: they make their own hardware and software, but they’ve been run out of the high-end smartphone market by Apple and now they’re reduced to using Windows Phone 7. Good luck with that.

Apple though, is lucky: they do it all. Hardware, software, a culture of excellence and attention to detail that turns out success after success. This is how great businesses are run.