Advantages Of Apple's Competitive Advantage

Apple’s competitive advantages can be indicated as follows:
1. Product differentiation
2. Vertical integration
3. Supply chain management
4. Internal Innovation

Product Differentiation
Jobs’ vision for Apple was always built around four main pillars:
1. Offer a small number of products;
2. Focus on the high end, where margins are greater;
3. Give priority to profits over market share;
4. Create a halo effect that makes people starve for new Apple products.
As a consequence Apple’s business strategy leveraged its unique ability to design and develop its own operating systems, hardware, application software, and services to provide its customers new products and solutions with superior user experience, seamless integration, and innovative design.

On the so-called vertical integration that the company has followed for the last few decades, he said, “Apple has the ability on all three of these spheres to innovate like crazy and cause magic. People are trying desperately to catch up and they are finding it’s not so easy to do.” Vertical integration has given Apple a competitive advantage, as it owns chip manufacturers, controls manufacturing, follows extremely strict software standards, and operates in a nearly closed ecosystem of proprietary retail stores. With these advantages, the company has more control of its value chain and, more importantly, its component

A lot of times, people don 't know what they want until you show it to them.” This quote became legendary as one of the most famous opinions from a highly opinionated man and it is remembered by so many because of the bold implications that Jobs makes about customer feedback.
Multiple studies (e.g. Furnham, Business Strategy Review, April 2000) have shown that individuals have a tendency to produce the most novel ideas when working alone, as opposed to crowdsourcing ideas from an external group. After all creative people are not fond of excessive parameters and feedback (and research has shown that external restrictions often kill creativity), and in fields where companies thrive on innovation, placing too much emphasis on what customers want destroys a company’s ability to be different.
Apple’s competitive edge resides in the ability to avoid the “sameness trap”. When you rely solely on consumer input, it is inevitable that they will tell you to do what other popular companies are doing, rather than indicating a new avenue never pursued before. When the products that your company produces are so pivotal as to be creating or redefining their product categories, and your insights are backed up with an enormously expensive creative process populated by world-class designers, then this process creates an enormous competitive advantage that put Apple at the forefront of the technology