One of the most important things that keeps me glued to Apple’s hardware and software ecosystem is the fact that, the vast majority of the time, things just work.

How many times did Steve Jobs get on stage at some event and say, “It just works”? So much so, that it became a clarion call for Apple, it became associated with the brand. And there’s good reason for that.

When I get a new printer, it just works with all my Macs. If there’s a struggle to print, it’s undoubtedly with my Windows machine. You get the idea.

This morning, Jim reminded me that we are once again temporarily mortal enemies as his Bruins take on my Caps in an important (to us, anyway) NHL matchup. I walked over to my Mac, typed a keystroke to bring up Reminders, clicked once to start a new reminder, then typed:

Mortal enemies Caps game 1pm

I then hit return. Two cool things happened. First, the Reminders application created a reminder set to remind me at 1pm, even though I had typed 1pm in the Reminder text itself. Reminders was smart enough to know that a time specified in a reminder was meant to schedule the reminder and not be part of the text. It just worked.

But the second cool thing was that the reminder also appeared on my iPhone and iPad reminder lists without any extra effort on my part. That single carriage return set Apple in motion on my behalf, working behind the scenes to make sure I got that “mortal enemies” reminder no matter what device I happened to be on.

To be fair, I don’t mean to imply that all Apple stuff will work all the time. There are plenty of people out there who have a pet peeve, some setup that doesn’t work for them. My point is that Apple’s products are designed to anticipate need, to make things as easy to use as possible. They are designed to just work. The little touches, like the Reminders example above, are what make these products work for me, what make the occasional hiccup worth working through.