When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.
I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better.
I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product.
Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.
Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.
But 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.
No one is going to buy a big phone.
Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes – that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.
Customers don’t measure you on how hard you tried, they measure you on what you deliver.
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.
To go forward you have to leave something behind.
The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.