Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.
Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.
People equated burning CDs with theft. That’s not what burning CDs is. Theft is about acquiring the music from the Internet.
I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn’t a strict vision between sort of science and art.
We’re not a media company. We don’t own media. We don’t own music. We don’t own films or television. We’re not a media company. We’re just Apple.
We’re cautious. We’d rather exceed expectations than miss but I think it’s going to be a continued difficult economy. Apple is trying a different way to navigate out of this, we’re trying to innovate.
Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because some decisions are being made along the way. We’ll find the mistakes. We’ll fix them.
What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‘outside the box,’ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.
Fear of failure falls away in the face of death.
When the sales guys run the company, the product guys do not matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.
Great engineers are a huge multiplier.
Combine science and humanities.
A brand is simply trust.
When we started off we didn’t know how to spell software.
I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future. This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.
What this means is that people are seeing a stable business, which is good, and a business that is in control, which is also good.
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down and things may be different tomorrow but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.
Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you’re at the top of the chain, sometimes people won’t give you honest feedback because they’re afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources.
There’s nothing that makes my day more than getting an e-mail from some random person in the universe who just bought an iPad over in the UK and tells me the story about how it’s the coolest product they’ve ever brought home in their lives. That’s what keeps me going.