Apple is very fluent when talking about the success of their products or how successful they became. Just listen to their conference call following financial results. They are much less when expressing their thoughts on things they fucked up.

Greg Joswiak at Apple is responsible for iOS, iPhone and iPod products marketing. In a recent interview Mr. Joswiak describes four ingredients to Apple’s success:

1. Focus: It means saying no, not saying yes.
2. Simplicity: Make complex things simple.
3. Courage: Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you
4. Best: If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it.

The last item on this list says a lot about Apple not selling TV sets for example. Courage is also interesting because for more than three decades now Apple wasn’t afraid to ditch products to create better version of them (iPod mini was replaced with iPod nano which became a hit).

Applying this receipe in the post Steve Jobs era in 2012, I expect Apple to refine many of its products with redesigns of the iMac, MacBook Pro and iPhone as Apple’s redesign cycles tend to be every two years.