I take it you’re only talking about hardware product development, right? Apple’s software product quality is pretty low. There certainly are lots of companies that far exceed Apple when it comes to software.

As for the hardware products, I think it mostly comes down to making quality a strategic priority. As a result they’re willing to spend more money and make sacrifices in other areas in order to build great high-quality hardware and a cohesive overall experience for users. For example, I suspect they deliberately de-prioritize pre-installed/default apps, like maps and email, and make hardware and integration throughout their ecosystem a higher priority. They let their apps be just good enough to keep too many people from downloading alternatives but they don’t try to make them great. People buy iPhones because they are widely seen as “the best” overall phone. Most people won’t buy a phone because of any one app, so there is no point in making any one better than good enough. So that’s one area where they allocate resources in a way that drives hardware quality.

Other smartphone makers have different strategic priorities that make them deprioritize quality. For example, some compete on low prices. Google got into the smartphone business largely for defensive reasons, and they’ve never put much focus on creating great phones. Microsoft was starting to follow Apple’s strategy, and maybe could have given them a run for their money, but they gave up pretty quickly because they could make more money elsewhere.

Their focus on design and what the user feels is amazing. Not so much so now, but the Steve Jobs era.

My favorite example is a few years back (don't remember how many) - people perceived iPhones as waaay faster than android phones, even though they had similar CPUs. It's because Apple made sure that in the hardware + software, the screen refresh would take priority. So users would literally see everything faster. It took Google years to finally do the same - they simply didn't think it would matter.

I am not working at Apple, but I just want to point out that there is a big power in terms of quality when a company controls the end-to-end process of creating a product.

Here are some examples:

- It eliminates some quality issues due to requirements misunderstanding

- It eliminates some delays specially the ones related to decision making

- It might allow deployment of the same levels of QA and QC with impact in the final product