Apple Mac Quotes

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.

product management

I've had lots of girlfriends. But the greatest high in my life was the day we introduced the Macintosh.

There have only been two milestone products in our industry: the Apple II in 197 and the IBM PC in 1981. Today, one year after Lisa, we are introducing the third industry milestone product: Macintosh. Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now, and it has turned out insanely great. Until no you've just seen some pictures of Macintosh. Now I'd like to show you Mcintosh in person.

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

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 decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [create the letters]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

design

Look at the Mercedes design, the proportion of sharp detail to flowing lines. Over the years they've made the design softer but the details starker. That's what we have to do with the Macintosh.

design

The Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people want to do something insanely great. The difference shows.

They [Microsoft] were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out. They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself. So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that's great. The question is, what's next? And what's going to keep driving this PC revolution?

Microsoft

Once you get into the problem...you see that it's complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level. That's what we wanted to do with the Mac.

Interesting - I use a Mac to help me design the next Cray.