Products and features need to resonate with an audience in order to succeed. People feel, sometimes immediately, when a feature resonates with them, and it’s that feeling that gives them a sense of whether a related product is revolutionary and not the other way around. The iPhone was almost immediately and universally recognized as a revolutionary device because its features resonated with anyone who hated their existing mobile phone, which was practically everyone. Conversely, the original Macintosh was also truly revolutionary, but struggled initially because the graphical user interface only resonated with a relatively small audience.

Sometimes a widely resonant feature requires a revolutionary product, but I would wager that most features that resonate with a wide audience don’t come via revolution, but through iteration. In the 2000s, Apple excelled at adding features that resonated with buyers to existing products. MagSafe, the pulsing sleep indicator, and hidden LEDs to show battery charge are just a few examples of widely resonant features that were added iteratively to Apple’s laptops that buyers immediately understood and desired. Apple was so good at finding these sort of features that many in the tech world painted the company as some sort of pied piper, one that used gimmicks to trick buyers into paying more for computers that didn’t even run Windows.

One of my criticisms of Apple during the 2010s is how often the company would chase “revolutionary” rather than embrace iteration and emphasize features that would resonate most with customers. A good example of this is the now defunct 3D Touch. In my mind, the killer feature of 3D Touch was “trackpad mode”, wherein pressing anywhere on iOS’s keyboard would turn it into a trackpad for precisely moving the insertion point and selecting text¹. Most people, even Apple enthusiasts, probably don’t remember this version of the feature and I wouldn’t be surprised if many didn’t even know it existed in the first place. That’s because Apple itself didn’t mention it when 3D Touch was announced.²

Apple instead chose to pitch 3D Touch as the “revolutionary” follow up to multitouch, and primarily promoted Quick Actions and Peek and Pop³. While still useful, I would argue both were “nice to have” features, each looking for a problem to solve. A quicker way to take selfies or preview a message was nice, but no one was really stymied by taking selfies or browsing email before 3D Touch. It was obvious from the start that 3D Touch was not revolutionary, and these features didn’t resonate with enough iPhone users even if it was. Precise intuitive text editing, on the other hand, would have resonated with anyone who has ever become frustrated while trying to edit text on a smartphone, which I would wager was most smartphone users⁴. By artificially inflating 3D Touch to “revolutionary”, Apple steered the messaging away from its most resonant feature.

In more recent years, Apple has made progress in delighting users by bringing back features that resonate. MacBooks have MagSafe and iMacs have color. That being said, I still think today’s Apple often struggles to identify which features resonate with their customers. A good example of this is the Apple TV.

My sense is that the company doesn’t quite know how to pitch the Apple TV. Apple TV is not a revolutionary product, especially in 2024, and on paper doesn’t offer much more than what is already included with modern day smart TVs. Apple’s inability to pitch the Apple TV means the conversation around it is dominated by its price, which is foolishly oversimplistic. Sure, in relative pricing, an Apple TV at any price will always be infinitely more expensive than whatever crap software that comes free with a smart TV. Macs are more expensive than Chromebooks too. In absolute pricing however, an Apple TV costs $129. Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than the cheapest iPod Apple ever sold. Apple TV is a steal if you care about the experience of watching TV, and has great features that I think would resonate with many buyers if Apple actually promoted them. The best example of this in my mind is audio.

I have been pairing my Apple TVs with HomePods to get Home Theater Audio for a few years now. Despite the name, the feature I think would resonate with most people is not immersive audio, because Home Theater Audio isn’t truly immersive. The resonant feature is really good audio that makes it possible to understand what the hell characters are saying without having to install a complicated five-plus speaker system for surround sound. Apple has even already done the ad for that second part.

AirPods support is another Apple TV audio feature that I think would resonate with a lot of people. Being able to connect multiple AirPods to an Apple TV was a godsend when my wife and I were sleep training our kid and has since proven useful when one of us wants to watch something while the other sleeps. That may not resonate with everyone, but I would wager there are more people interested in watching a show without disturbing a sleeping family member than those interested in playing iOS games on their TV.

Another feature that would obviously resonate with Apple’s customers that the company seems to be outright avoiding is emoji Tapbacks. Messages currently only lets you “Tapback” with six emoji-like and subtly animated glyphs. People want and have become accustomed to using any emoji to react to a given message. To my knowledge, Apple never claimed Tapbacks were revolutionary, but its insistence on excluding emoji is actively dissonant to what its customers want. While the most recent version of Messages does support using emoji as stickers, the implementation spitefully obscures text. Even with a better implementation, the feature would still be dissonant, because stickers aren’t what their customers expect.

Revolutionary products necessarily have features that resonate with a wide audience, but most resonant features happen through iteration. Eschewing iteration in the pursuit of “revolutionary” risks increasingly forgoing features that resonate with customers. Always chasing features in lieu of a revolutionary approach is indeed penny wise and pound foolish, but repeatedly doing the opposite might just be worse.