Steve Jobs

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.

The desktop metaphor was invented because one you were a stand-alone device and two you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

The manual for WordStar the most popular word-processing program is 400 pages thick. To write a novel you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers they would continue to open their wallets.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement and I've done that sort of thing in my life but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.

This revolution the information revoultion is a revolution of free energy as well but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now or 50 years from now?

I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den.

Computers themselves and software yet to be developed will revolutionize the way we learn.

But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business but in reality I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So we're going to reinvent the phone.

We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before - sync your iPhone with your PC or mac.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

With our technology with objects literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money or make them so much money or cost them so much money, if they miss it that they are going to fuel the object revolution.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

You know my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous all the attention to it because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

Bottom line is I didn't return to Apple to make a fortune. I've been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25 my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn't going to let it ruin my life. There's no way you could ever spend it all and I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

Things don't have to change the world to be important.

I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands it wouldn't be ours anymore.

Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

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.

And 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.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

We've demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don't let it burn a hole in our pocket we don't allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we'd like to continue to keep our powder dry because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.

I think right now it's a battle for the mindshare of developers and for the mindshare of customers and right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut destiny life karma whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my life.

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.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number add it to this number put the result there perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of let's say 1 000 000 per second. At 1 000 000 per second the results appear to be magic.