Apple is a perfect example of a company that thinks deeply and obsessively about real-world problems. There's no dedicated R&D department-research is expected from each department, from design, to product to marketing. There isn't a separation between research and execution.

The iPod is one of the best examples of how deep research can create a wildly successful product. Portable MP3 players had been around for years, but Steve Jobs and the Apple team thought they were garbage.

What made the iPod so successful is the level of research and prototyping before launch. The iPod started with a pretty basic problem:

• MP3 players on the market didn't work well. Those with flash memory could only hold a CD worth of songs, while those with a hard drive were too big and too difficult to use. For each, it took too long to transfer songs.
• With the rise of Napster and MP3 downloads, there was a clear shift in the distribution of music, which none of the portable MP3 players available were meeting. iTunes was already being developed to include a CD burning feature.

Tony Fadell, who led Apple's iPod team, spent six weeks in stealth mode looking at the competition. The conclusion that he came to was that the iPod had to be something that could hold a lot of music, and a long battery life. He brought three prototypes of the iPod to Steve Jobs before product development began.

None of these were groundbreaking innovations-they weren't even all things that Apple created internally. What made the iPod work was that each of these small elements involved deep thinking about how the iPod could be the best product on the market. As Johnny Ives said of the iPod, "Every single component, every process, has been considered and measured to make sure that it's truly useful and that it actually enhances the user's experience."

What the iPod did was look into a future where you could have thousands of songs in your pocket.

Competing products forced you to click a button to scroll through each song, while the iPod's rotating wheel allowed people to easily browse through a massive library of music. It united what was capable with technology, with what customers actually wanted to do.

Each successive "iPod killer" launched by the competition, from Dell's DJ to the Creative's Zen, outpaced the iPod in terms of technical specifications. But none of them was executed with the same thought as Apple. What made the iPod were the details.