Different is cheap to copy, better is not
After the iMac, translucent plastic appeared on staplers and irons. The look spread in months. What made the computer better did not.
It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
In 1998 Apple released the iMac, a computer in translucent blue plastic designed by a team led by Jonathan Ive. Within a year translucent colored plastic had spread across consumer goods: staplers, clothes irons, kitchen scales, other companies’ computers. The difference Apple introduced was visible and easy to copy, and many companies copied it.
What they mostly did not copy was the rest. The iMac was designed to be set up in minutes, with the monitor built in, few cables and a single path to the internet. It dropped the floppy drive and older ports in favor of the then-new USB standard. Those choices took years of work and a willingness to annoy some customers, and they were what made it better for the people it was meant for. The color was the part a competitor could buy.
That is the sense of the line. Difference is a choice about appearance or positioning, and it can be made in a meeting. Being better requires knowing what the user is trying to do and removing obstacles one by one. It takes longer, it is harder to see from outside, and it is much harder to imitate.
The iPod in 2001 is another case. It was far from the first portable music player. It was better at the things that mattered to buyers, such as storage, navigation and transferring songs from a computer, and that was enough to overtake devices that had been on the market for years.
The line can be pushed too far. In a crowded market, being different is sometimes the only way to be noticed, and a product nobody notices cannot show that it is better. Many small companies survive by picking a clear difference, such as a narrow audience, a distinct style or an unusual price, while they work on quality. Difference gets the first look; better keeps the customer.
There is also the question of who decides what counts as better. Designers can refine details customers never perceive, and engineers can improve measures that do not matter to anyone buying. Better is judged by the user doing the job, and it often means improving something dull, like setup time, over something admired, like finish. Ive’s own examples tend to be about exactly that kind of improvement.
For founders the useful test is to ask of each distinctive feature whether a competitor could copy it in a month. If so, it is a difference. The things that would take a competitor a year are more likely to be the ones that make the product better.