Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!.
— The famous last words of Steve
Jobs
When I hire somebody really senior,
competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is; are they going to fall
in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.
— Steve Jobs
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be
harder than complex.
— Steve Jobs
Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works.
— Steve Jobs
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where
excellence is expected.
— Steve Jobs
We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it.
It's pretty great.
— Steve Jobs (Keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Development Conference,
2004)
Nobody
has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.
— Steve Jobs
You can’t just ask the customers what they want and then try to give that
to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
— Steve Jobs
Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each
other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve
been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has
figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea..
— Steve Jobs in Business Week magazine
People from technology don't understand the creative process that these
companies go through to make their products, and they don't appreciate how hard it is. And the creative
companies don't appreciate how creative technology is; they think it's just something you buy. And so there
is a gulf of understanding between the two of them.
— Steve Jobs, Wall Street Journal
We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first
start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people
stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can
often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.
— Steve Jobs, Newsweek
It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really
contribute something amazing.
— Steve Jobs, in Playboy interview
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.
— Steve Jobs, Fortune magazine
Picasso had a saying. He said, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been
shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people
working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be
the best computer scientists in the world.
— Steve Jobs, in PBS’s "Triumph of the Nerds, 1996
I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll
sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry.
There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
— Steve Jobs
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t
mean that in a small way,
I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much
culture into their products.
— Steve Jobs
Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.
— Steve Jobs
In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the
curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the
fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the
product or service.
— Steve Jobs, in Fortune magazine
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want
until you show it to them.
— Steve Jobs
It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the
wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by
saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
— Steve Jobs
Look at
the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something
much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you
come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem
and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple
solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are
smart, and want objects which are well thought through.
— Steve Jobs, Newsweek, 2006