Elon Musk's core engineering rule: eliminate any part that doesn't have to exist. Tesla removed physical buttons for screens, Apple ditched the keyboard and home button. The tradeoff: sleeker products that sometimes frustrate users.
There's a thing that Elon talks about that I think more people should hear. And Lex asked him, he goes, how do you engineer great things? You're building rockets that can land on themselves, you're building the best electric cars on the planet, you just did the Neuralink chip in the guy's brain. He goes, in my companies, if it's a machine, we'll try to delete a part. Can we get rid of a part and will the thing still work?
But I think he removes too much stuff. Like, I have a Tesla, sometimes you don't even need to like switch into reverse, like it automatically does that. But, and you also don't have any buttons, you know, it's just screen, I want the damn button. I don't want the damn screen. You know what I mean? He removes a lot of stuff.
I mean, look at the iPhone, right? Most successful product of all time. When they came out and they removed the keyboard, people were freaking out. Then they removed the home button. Are you nuts? Like, this is crazy. And they got rid of the home button. Then they got rid of the port. The best companies in the world actually do this.
