Quotes about Apple

I was lucky—I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was twenty. We worked hard, and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at thirty I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

personal

The thing that bound us together at Apple was the ability to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important.

change the world

The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq.

What Apple is, is it's an environment where we can attract the best and the brightest people to come together and sort of have a common vision about how we can change the world, and it's very rare that we can actually put something back into the world.

business

I received a letter from a six-and-a-half-year-old boy a few months ago which to me completely sums up what we've accomplished in the last few years. And it reads: "Dear Mr. Jobs: I was doing a crossword puzzle and a clue was "as American as apple blank." I thought the answer was computer, but my Mom said it was pie."

That's simply untrue. As soon as we can lower prices, we do. It's true that our computers are less expensive today than they were a few years ago, or even last year. But that's also true of the IBM PC. Our goal is to get computers out to tens of millions of people, and the cheaper we can make them, the easier it's going to be to do that. I'd love it if Macintosh cost $1,000.

business

John Sculley ruined Apple, and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place—which was making great computers for people to use.

management

You know, I've got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can't say any more than that it's the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.

If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth—and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.

Microsoft

My position coming back to Apple was that our industry was in a coma. It reminded me of Detroit in the seventies, when American cars were boats on wheels. That's why we have a really good chance to be a serious player again.

O.K., tell me what's wrong with this place. It's the products! So what's wrong with the products? The products SUCK! There's no sex in them anymore!

Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could—I'm searching for the right word—could, could die.

Nobody has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.

This is not a one-man show. There's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.

management

Victory in our industry is spelled survival. The way we're going to survive is to innovate our way out of this.

business

Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: We do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we're really good at packaging that all together into a product. We're the only people left in the computer industry who do that.

iconic

The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.

management

I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

business

So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we're having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda-80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week.

management

It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what they want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.

business marketing

I used to be the youngest guy in every meeting I was in, and now I'm usually the oldest. And the older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much difference. HP's primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world's best PCs—not to be the biggest or the richest. We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit—both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products. For a time, those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back we had to make it a product company again.

business

A creative period like this lasts only maybe a decade, but it can be a golden decade if we manage it properly.

business iconic

Sell well-designed, well-made technology products that aren't the cheapest on the market, but command dependable loyalty from customers because the Apple brand is a mark of quality.

business

It pained us to see the music companies and the technology companies basically threatening to take each other to court and all this other crazy stuff. So we thought that rather than sit around and throw stones, we'd actually do something about this.

It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can't overestimate it!

What we do at Apple is very simple: We invent stuff. We make the best personal computers in the world, some of the best software, the best portable MP3/music player, and now we make the best online music store in the world. We just make stuff. So I don't know what impresario means. We make stuff, put it out there, and people use it.

It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

product management

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. They'll want to do what's best for Apple, not what's best for them, what's best for Steve, or anybody else.

hiring

We hire people who want to make the best things in the world. You'd be surprised how hard people work around here. They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be. People care so much, and it shows.

hiring

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.

business

Picasso had a saying: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Apple Mac

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

apples management

Apple is in a pretty interesting position. Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac—it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork done on a Mac. Almost every artist I've met has an iPod, and most of the, music execs now have iPods. And one of the reasons Apple was able to do what we have done was because we are perceived by the music industry as the most creative technology company.

Some people say,"Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble."And, you know, I think it wouldn't be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do.

leadership

All we are is our ideas, our people. That's what keeps us going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people. I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

hiring

Most of us can't wait to get to work in the morning. But it's not like Apple has somehow morphed into a mass-market consumer electronics company. Our DNA hasn't changed. It's that mass-market consumer electronics is turning into Apple.

What if Apple didn't exist? Think about it. Time [magazine] wouldn't get published next week. Some 70% of the newspapers in the U.S. wouldn't publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn't have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn't have computers. More than half the websites created on Macs wouldn't exist. So there's something worth saving here. See?

What are the great brands? Levi's, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn't been doing anything with this incredible asset. 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.

The place where Apple has been standing for the last two decades is exactly where computer technology and the consumer electronics markets are converging. So it's not like we're having to cross the river to go somewhere else; the other side of the river is coming to us.

We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we're living in, these tools surprise you.... That's why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we're constantly surprised with what people do with them.

computers

The organization is clean and simple to understand, and very accountable. Everything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.

I get asked a lot why Apple's customers are so loyal. It's not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That's ridiculous. It's because when you buy our products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure out [how to get past it]. And you think, "Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this!". . .. There's almost no product in the world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac. And you have it with an iPod.

product management business

At Apple, there are ten really important decisions to make every week. It's a transactional company: it's got a lot of new products every month. And if some of those decisions are wrong, maybe you can fix them a few months later. At Pixar, because I'm not directing the movies, there are just a few really important strategic decisions to make every month, maybe even every quarter, but they're really hard to change. Pixar's much slower-paced. But you can't change your mind when you go down these paths.

Pixar

It cost us, I don't know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.

Originally, we weren't exactly sure how to market the [iPod] Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it's the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that's the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don't need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.

I've said this before. but thought it was worth repeating: It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. And a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs. And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC. And we think we're on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in the organization to build these kinds of products. And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in this market And I hope that what you've seen today gives you a good feel for that.

We don't think one company can do everything. So you've got to partner with people that are really good at stuff. .. We're not trying to be great at search, so we partner with people who are great at search.... We know how to do the best map clients in the world, but we don't know how to do the back end, so we partner with people that know how to do the back end. And what we want to do is be that consumer's device and that consumer's experience wrapped around all this information and things we can deliver to them in a wonderful user interface, in a coherent product.

iPhone

The things I'm most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic come together, as it did in publishing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I'm the most proud of.

Apple is the most creative technology company out there—just like Pixar is the most technologically adept creative company.. .. Also, almost all recording artists use Macs and they have iPods, and now most of the music industry people have iPods as well. There's a trust in the music community that Apple will do something right—that it won't cut corners—and that it cares about the creative process and about the music. Also, our solution encompasses operating system software, server software, application software, and hardware. Apple is the only company in the world that has all that under one roof. We can invent a complete solution that works—and take responsibility for it.

Pixar

We never talk about future products. There used to be a saying at Apple: Isn't it funny? A ship that leaks from the top. So—I don't wanna perpetuate that. So I really can't say.

As technology becomes more complex, Apple's core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand. The Dells of the world don't spend money; they don't think about these things.

If we could make four great product platforms that's all we need. We can put our A team on every single one of them instead of having a B or a C team on any. We can turn them much faster.

prescient

There's a very strong DNA within Apple, and that's about taking state-of-the-art technology and making it easy for people...people who don't want to read manuals, people who live very busy lives.

product management

We've reviewed the road map of new products and axed more than 70 percent of them, keeping the 30 percent that were gems. The product teams at Apple are very excited. There's so much low-hanging fruit, it's easy to turn around.

The trouble with Apple is it succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. We succeeded so well, we got everyone else to dream the same dream. The rest of the world became just like it. The trouble is, the dream didn't evolve. Apple stopped creating.

At Apple we gave all our employees stock options very early on. We were among the first in Silicon Valley to do that. And when I returned, I took away most of the cash bonuses and replaced them with options. No cars, no planes, no bonuses. Basically, everybody gets a salary and stock.. .. It's a very egalitarian way to run a company that Hewlett-Packard pioneered and that Apple, I would like to think, helped establish.

management

Well, I gotta tell you—we don't do it because it goes down well or not. We have a problem, and our problem was that people had forgotten what Apple stands for. As a matter of fact, a lot of our employees have forgotten what Apple stands for. And so we needed a way to communicate what the heck Apple's all about. And we thought, how do you tell somebody what you are, who you are, what you care about? And the best way we could think of was, you know, if you know who somebody's heroes are, that tells you a lot about them. So we thought we're going to tell people who our heroes are, and that's what the "Think Different" campaign is about. It's about telling people who we admire, who we think are the heroes of this century. And—some people will like us, and some people won't like us.

At Apple we come at everything asking, "How easy is this going to be for the user? How great it is going to be for the user?" After that, it's like at Pixar. Everyone in Hollywood says the key to good animated movies is story, story, story. But when it really gets down to it, when the story isn't working, they will not stop production and spend more money and get the story right. That's what I see about the software business. Everybody says, "Oh, the user is the most important thing," but nobody else really does it.

Pixar