Apple's Devotement to Professionalism

One of the things that I noticed looking at the picture of competing MP3 players to the iPod and competing phones to the iPhone is that Apple's seem so much more polished. However, they also seem a lot cleaner, using simple things such as highlighting menu items and pure white backgrounds. The use of images is sparing and the pictures are often less important than the text. Something that I noticed on the competing players is that they use absurd fonts or layouts, and the images are used without the text to intuitively tell what they actually are. Icons are not enough, you have to have the text to back it up. The idea of spatial intelligence plays a large part in UI design. Things like the Zune are pitifully trying to be 'cool', while the corporate giants do not realize that the spartan UI is actually the coolest. Such distracting UI designs remove the focus from the intent (music or telephony), and instead provides the player virtually saying, "Look at me! I'm cool!" This is also a problem in phone UIs, which were never cool before the iPhone.