Mac users and the Kindle

This past Thursday, Randy Murray wrote on Twitter:

I did not expect: Mac fanatics love Kindles. It tops the list in sales of Patrick Rhone's new book, Keeping It Straight http://t.co/CMQsQIs

I was a bit surprised at his surprise, but I saw a few others react similarly, so I was prompted to write a response.

In brief, I believe Amazon, in the third iteration of their only hardware product, has managed to capture a bit of Apple's design philosophy: the Kindle doesn't attempt to do anything except what it does well, and what it does well, it does better than any of its competition - it presents present long-form documents for reading.

All of Apple's products seem to be designed with a variant of this philosophy. The early iPods are the best example of this philosophy, and while the feature set of later iPods have grown, they've not strayed much - each feature is designed to be simple to use and to just work. They work so well that it's difficult for Apple's competitors to compete unless they take on the same philosophy, which seems to be brutally hard for most to do.

iPhones my be the pinnacle of Apple's application of this design philosophy. Though at times if feels like they can do anything, they really can't. What they do - browse the web, run apps, play music - they do better better than any other smartphone made. They handle phone calls quite well too, when good phone service is provided to them.

The Kindle is blissfully feature-light, as it is only designed to read long form documents. Those features are focused on optimizing that experience: the gorgeous, read-anywhere-there's-light display, the seemingly eternal battery life, the simple access to the best selection of ebooks, the ease of purchasing said books, the automatic bookmarking and syncing of bookmarks; I could go on and on regarding the minute details they've attended to.

The native apps Amazon makes available for other platforms enhance access to the Kindle. For instance, when I'm reading a book on my kindle and it's got a detailed and/or color picture, I grab my iPad, fire up the Kindle app, sync the book to it, and boom, there's the picure in color and a zoomable higher resolution. So nice.

Amazon's one current hardware product seems to have followed a design philosophy that Apple has perfected: they've created a product that does one thing better than any of its competition. Apple fans understand and appreciate that fact.