Apple has been practically mocked for how many years it has taken for it to release a foldable iPhone, but yet again it's proven it knew what it was doing all along.

Think of the iPhone. Or the iPod, the Mac, the iPad, AirPods, AirTags, the Apple Watch... Actually, try to think of anything where Apple was actually first to market. Apple wasn't even the first company to make a laptop Mac. To even arguably find a product Apple made first, you have to go back to the Apple II. Even then, as revolutionary as it was, there had been computers before it.

So from the start, Apple's had a playbook of doing precisely the same things with absolutely every product it makes. We can't know if Steve Jobs and his successors actually planned that, or it just was never quick enough to be first. But whatever is behind it, the company goes through the same cycle every time. Apple is far from first. It enters the market late. It charges more than anyone. Has obviously better design. Grows the market. Is copied mercilessly.

Apple typically designs in a way that isn't just different to its rivals. It's a way that those rivals, as impossible as this sounds, still don't get. That's because what Apple does and always does is look at how people are going to use its products. Its use first, then technology.