The reason that Apple is able to create products like iPad is because we always try to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both.
There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will.
I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn’t replace one of these people with fifty average people.
Never settle for average.
Our friends up north spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple.
Nobody has tried to swallow us since I’ve been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.
We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.
Guess who surprised themselves and changed their minds.
If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt if I would have bought the company.
The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.
School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.
It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment.
I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year?
The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.
The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.
It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic. I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.
It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.
Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experienes that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.