How do Apple’s major products relate to one another in a logical and practical way? And how does Apple seek to ensure compelling functions for each of their devices, large and small?

In a recent interview Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, spelled out a deceptively simple logic for how Apple’s products all work together—almost like a set of inter-nested Russian dolls:

“The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook.”

Following the logic through, the function of the iMac desktop computer must then be to surpass the roles of its smaller siblings: “Its job is to challenge what we think a computer can do and do things that no computer has ever done before, be more and more powerful and capable so that we need a desktop because of its capabilities,” said Schiller.

How might we think of this approach in terms of what we, in Innovating Minds, call goal tuning?

The Five Interrelated Components of Goal Tuning

Clearly, it’s an example of goal synergy—purposefully pursuing multiple goals as interconnected. The addition of new players such as the Apple Watch and the iPad Pro are instances of “goal making/goal finding” and “goal updating” as the new products emerged, in part, from concrete insights gained from using the other devices. Their approach also helps with knowing which future and long-term goals should be endorsed (and articulated).

—> For additional background

Steven Levy, “The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs,” Backchannel

“Ever-Renewing Goals and Keeping Our Aims in View,” in Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change, pages 212—231