The cleverest trick that Apple has ever pulled isn’t convincing us to pay $500 for a phone or MP3 player, but rather convincing the world that if you want good design, then you have to follow Apple’s template of clean lines and stripped-down details. You can see how that happened: The company has become so synonymous with both good design and minimalism that most people assume those two things are one and the same. They’re not: You can have good design that’s fanciful and wacky; likewise, you can have minimalist design that’s horrible.

The fact is, minimalism has been a business strategy for Apple–and maybe their most successful business strategy of all. While just-in-time manufacturing and a stand-alone retailing have earned it hundreds of billions in sales, minimalism built the brand that made their gadgets lust-worthy to begin with. Let’s dissect how that works.

One of the best features of Apple’s gadgets hides in plain sight: Each one looks closely related to the others. The Apple TV interface isn’t too far different from that of iTunes; iTunes itself borrows the basic feel of the Apple OS. Meanwhile, the gadgets themselves take up that same sort of family feel: The iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iPhone are all radically different devices but they’re immediately recognizable as cousins thanks to their shared detailing and material palette.

When you buy another Apple gadget you’ve already been primed to love it.

To appreciate how unique that is, simply look at some of their competitors. While Microsoft’s new mobile OS is remarkably well designed, its design language has no relationship to the xBox UI, or the Windows OS. Not only do HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung make boring black boxes, but every single black box they make seems to have no relationship with the others. As Apple has proved, that’s a massive missed opportunity. Each one of Apple’s gadgets quietly sells the others, every single day you have it. When you buy an iPhone, you’re buying into the Apple design language, and the little details you come to appreciate are details you know you’ll find in all their other products–from the laser-etched buttons to the stunningly beautiful screws to the dead-simple UI layout. When you finally decide to buy another Apple gadget–say, an iPad or a MacBook Air–you’ve already been primed to love it.

It would extremely hard to pull that off without a minimalist design language. The wilder your detailing and form-factor are, the harder they are to translate to totally different products. Not so with a minimalist palette–in that case, simply lifting a few, select details such as an aluminum case or a particular rounded corner, is enough to suggest a strong, familial relationship.

Brands are only as good as their last redesign: Almost every industry, from cars to computers to clothing, is littered with some cautionary tale about a run-away success that was replaced with a disaster. The goodwill that a company can build with a remarkably designed product can disappear overnight, if its successors don’t live up to expectations. Over time, and with greater and greater successes, the inherent risk that you carry with a redesign only grows.

It’s no surprise that Apple’s own designs have grown more conservative over time.

Thus, it’s no surprise that Apple’s own designs have grown more and more conservative over time as the company has evolved from a nearly dead also-ran into the world’s most valuable company. Take the iMac. The original design announced the company’s overhaul, and its boldness was a response to the enormous challenges that the company faced in 1997. The “sunflower” design that followed that was no less radical, with its swiveling flat-panel monitor. But since then, the iMac’s evolution has slowed. Today, it’s own design language moves in lock-step with Apple’s broader design language. Much of the same thing has happend with the iPod: The original, all-white design language has given way to a larger and larger screen–which means that the canvas for the rest of the design has grown successively smaller, so that these days, when you see a new design for the iPhone or the iPad, the redesigns are remarkable in how little actually changes.