Quotes by Steve Jobs

To follow the path that others have laid before you is a reasonable course of action; therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.

I’d rather be a Pirate than join the Navy

I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.

If you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a culture shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

The roots of apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another dell or compaq.

In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can’t switch gears. It’s a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they’re the same thing.

The customer is the final inspector.

It’s not like Windows users don’t have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that’s an incredibly depressing thought

I hate the way people use PowerPoints instead of thinking

Apple is the only company in the world that has all of that under one roof. We can invent a complete a solution that works – and take responsibility for it.

Stealing music is not right, and I can understand people being very upset about their intellectual property being stolen.

The iPod is not a new category. Music is not new. It’s not a speculative market. It’s a very, very large market. It’s been around for thousands of years and will be around as long as humans exist.

[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn.

if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.

A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer.

Ad campaigns are necessary for competition. But good PR educates people; that’s all it is.

The biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm.

The Macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one.

I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn’t a strict vision between sort of science and art.

Probably death is the best invention of life.

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that’s the problem with most philanthropy – there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. On the importance of loving what you do…

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Do you know a good Steve Jobs quote? Let us know in the comments!

I’ve been rejected, but I am still in love.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.

Creativity is just connecting things.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

Focusing is about saying No.

For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to be someone I’m not.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

The journey is the reward

I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.

Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize the company

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication- Steve Jobs turned this into the slogan behind an early Mac advertising campaign. Which doesn’t make it less true.

Innovation is the only way to win.

There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s? another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important-creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

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.

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product.

If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop… But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem – and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster… carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.

Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished. Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person.

We just wanted to build the best thing we could build

Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data

When you’re in a start-up, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.

I think Pixar has the opportunity to be the next Disney – not replace Disney – but be the next Disney.

Why would I ever want to run Disney? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to sell them Pixar and retire?

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life… so love what you do. Your time is limited. Don’t waste it…

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R amp&; D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers…..

I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success – I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

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.

Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.

There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind.’ It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

Your time on this earth is limited, don’t live someone else’s life, live by your vision.

When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.

We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That’s how you have to think of this. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing.

Don’t let the voice of other people’s opinion drown your inner voice.

If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.

I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Somebody once told me, ‘Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.’ What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

You have to be burning with “an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right.” If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.

Everything is important- that success is in the details.

What we’re doing here will send a giant ripple through the universe.

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.

?Experts are clueless.

Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process. They try to use processes to substitute content.

That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.

I’ve got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I’m not at all convinced that the twain will meet.

Design isn’t just how it looks. It’s how it works.

The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in.

Customers always want something new

You are all over the map, figure out the top 5 things you want to focus on and get rid of the rest.

I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence

I don’t want to fail, of course. But even though I didn’t know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn’t really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I’ve tried my best.

If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person-a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and… it wasn’t that important – because I never did it for the money.

You’re already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

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 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.

Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently – they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

A lot of people think big business in America is a bad thing. I think it’s a really good thing. Most people in business are ethical, hard-working, good people. And it’s a meritocracy.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you daven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences. But if you have the same experiences as everyone else, you are unlikely to look in a different direction.

Do’ let the noise of others” opinions drown out your own inner voice.

For most of my life, I”ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye. This is who I am, and you ca’ expect me to be someone I’m not.

There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they”re doing, you say “wow,” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there”s? another side to the coin, and you ca’ remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important-creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.

You can’t win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate it to customers.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

A-plus players like to work together and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work

Believe things will work out. How was I ever to know that the girl who broke my heart in university would lead to my soulmate? How was I to know that the ‘dream job’ I was rejected from out of college would lead me to a year of entrepreneurship and adventure in Spain? How was I to know that taking a miserable job back in the states would be just the push I needed to vow to never do something I wasn’t passionate about again? Everything works out. I mean everything. As long as you believe it will. When you do, you will find the silver lining. That will take you to the next level.

We don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content. What’s new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet- and no one’s gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock-open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it- puts it on the Internet. You’ll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Our approach is to think of companies not as businesses but as collections of people. We [Apple]want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don’t just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We’re seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.

There will always be music on the Internet that people can steal. What’s new is not theft. What’s new is a distribution channel for stolen property called the Internet. So there will always be illegal music on the Internet.

One of the failures of technology companies is that they build technologies thinking everything else will work out.

As Regis Mckenna once said, the best marketing is education

If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right

We believe people with Passion CAN change the World for the Better.” -Steve Jobs

the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

When you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance…. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.

I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself: If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town, and we’ve been together ever since.

Pixar is seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn’t seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…. We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.

Electronics was something I could always fall back on when I needed food on the table.

Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no.

I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay.

I don’t mind if people don’t like me. Well, I might a little … but I really mind it when somebody uses their position at Time magazine to tell 10 million people they don’t like me. I know what it’s like to have your private life painted in the worst possible light in front of a lot of people.

I know that living with me was not a bowl of cherries.

If you view computer designers as artists, they’re really into more of an art form that can be mass-produced, like records, or like prints, than they are into fine arts. They want something where they can express themselves to a large number of people through their medium, and their medium is technology and manufacturing.

It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear.

It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.

My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.

My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.

Not only was [Edwin Land] one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.

So [Polaroid’s Dr. Edwin] Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be – not an astronaut, not a football player – but this.

That’s my job – to make sure everything is great.

That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.”

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind’s problems. I believe that very much.

The web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It’s going to augment the world. And once you’re in this web-augmented space, you’re going to see that democratization takes place.

To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music. How do we possibly do this?

We did not enter the search business. [Google] entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.

We wanted to more richly experience why we were alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of things. The great thing that came from those that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late sixties and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.

We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place; the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn’t really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down…. I was a very public failure.

When I went to school, it was right after the ’60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in…. The idealistic wind of the ’60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.

Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company – which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.

You’ve probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind of you and you can’t breathe. That’s how I felt.

A brand is simply trust.

When we started off we didn’t know how to spell software.

Be honest with yourself and with people always do everything on time. Never give up, go to your goals, even if all the bad. In this life, all really, you only need to do. The more I talk to people, the more I am convinced that in general they have one goal – to become the richest dead in the cemetery.

Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because some decisions are being made along the way. We’ll find the mistakes. We’ll fix them.

When the sales guys run the company, the product guys do not matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.

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.

Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you’re at the top of the chain, sometimes people won’t give you honest feedback because they’re afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources.

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

I’m not worried about the country’s long-term future. This country is insanely great. What I’m worried about is that we don’t talk enough about solutions.

Believe things will work out. How was I ever to know that the girl who broke my heart in university would lead to my soulmate? How was I to know that the “dream job” I was rejected from out of college would lead me to a year of entrepreneurship and adventure in Spain? How was I to know that taking a miserable job back in the states would be just the push I needed to vow to never do something I was’ passionate about again? Everything works out. I mean everything. As long as you believe it will. When you do, you will find the silver lining. That will take you to the next level.

You”ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers…..

Remembering that I”ll be dead soon is the most important tool I”ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

The problem with the Internet startup craze is’ that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people are’ sticking with it.

Start small, think big. Do’ worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.

There’s a phrase in Buddhism, “Beginner’s mind.” It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

Your time on this earth is limited, do’ live someone else’s life, live by your vision.

When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.

Do’ let the voice of other people’s opinion drown your inner voice.

If we do’ cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.

I”d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.

It does’ make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Somebody once told me, “Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.” What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.

Do your best at every job. Don’t sleep! Success generates more success so be hungry for it. Hire good people with a passion for excellence.

The web is just going to be one more of those major change factors that businesses face every decade.

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

A lot of time, people don’t do great things becoz’ great things really aren’t expected of them.

Be ready to catch the ball when it is thrown by life.

Don’t just follow your passion but something larger than yourself.

The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that’s gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there’s not enough information to do that – it’s an intuitive process.

It’s very simple: The more successful you are, the more you’ll earn. But if you’re not successful, you will not earn a dime.

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.

All the work I’ve done in my life will be obsolete by the time I’m fifty.

Of course, we can not connect imprint future, you can just hook them to look back. So rest assured that the dots, the events in your life in one way or another will affect your future. You have to have faith in something – the courage, destiny, life, destiny or whatever – thinking that has made the difference in my life

Breakthrough is how to distinguish a leader and who followed

Combine science and humanities.

There’s nothing that makes my day more than getting an e-mail from some random person in the universe who just bought an iPad over in the UK and tells me the story about how it’s the coolest product they’ve ever brought home in their lives. That’s what keeps me going.

It’s not the consumers’ job to figure out what they want

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5&162; deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

Great engineers are a huge multiplier.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

What this means is that people are seeing a stable business, which is good, and a business that is in control, which is also good.

We’re cautious. We’d rather exceed expectations than miss but I think it’s going to be a continued difficult economy. Apple is trying a different way to navigate out of this, we’re trying to innovate.

Focusing is all about saying no

Fear of failure falls away in the face of death.

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down and things may be different tomorrow but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.

Almost everything ? all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure ? these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.

I don’t think it’s good that we’re perceived as different I think it’s important we’re perceived as MUCH BETTER. If being different is essential to doing that, then we have to do that, but if we could be much better without being different, that’d be fine with me. I want to be much better! I don’t care about being different, but we’ll have to be different in some ways to be much better.

The hardest thing when you think about focusing. You think focusing is about saying Yes. No. Focusing is about saying No. And when you say No, you piss off people.

Insanely Great!

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Almost everything: all external expectations, all pride all fear of embarrassment or failure. These tings just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

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. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.

You’ve got to find what you love and that is as true for work as it is for lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you’ve found it.

Was George Orwell right about 1984?

We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make me too products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream.

Real artists ship.

They’re babes in the woods. I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen.

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.

It’ll make your jaw drop.

My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT, and I wonder about Apple.

We believe it’s the biggest advance in animation since Walt Disney started it all with the release of Snow White 50 years ago.

really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.

I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D; dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D.; It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.

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

People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.

They are shamelessly copying us.

Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career…. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.

It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell!

We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.

So Mac OS X is cross-platform by design, right from the very beginning. So Mac OS X is singing on Intel processors, and I’d just like to show you right now. As a matter of fact… this system I’ve been using here… Let go have a look… So.. we’ve been running on an Intel machine all morning.

We intend to release Leopard at the end of 2006 or early 2007, right around the time when Microsoft is expected to release Longhorn.

No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don’t wanna die to get there.

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

I was at Reed [College] for only a few months. My parents intended for me to stay there for all four years but I decided that college wasn’t right for me. I had no idea what I wanted to do I didn’t see how college was going to help me.

People say sometimes, “You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world.” I don’t feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important-creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person-a person who does’ want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We”re here at the beginning of it and we”re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, “I worked really, really hard in my 20s.” And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

Music companies are not technology companies any more than technology companies are music companies. They’re really different from each other.

The technology companies don’t understand creative things at all. Silicon Valley’s view of the creative process in Hollywood is a bunch of guys in their young thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes.

The creative industries tend to dismiss technology as just something to buy and not understand how hard it is and how creative it can be as well.

It’s understandable that the music companies that are comprised of people that are successful by making good creative decisions – they have to decide which out of fifty artists is the next hot one, with no data to go from. It’s an intuitive process, and that’s what they do well when they’re successful. They don’t understand technology.

I’d say we [Apple Inc.] are the most creative of the technology companies and definitely the most artist-friendly. Almost everyone in the music business uses a Mac and everyone has an iPod.

People equated burning CDs with theft. That’s not what burning CDs is. Theft is about acquiring the music from the Internet.

Stealing things is everybody’s problem. We [Apple Inc.] own a lot of intellectual property, and we don’t like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we’re optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don’t want to be; there’s just no legal alternative.

If you tell people they can’t burn CDs of their music, as almost every current legal music service has done, or they can only burn one CD with a track or pay per track per burn extra, nobody is going to go for it.

We’re not a media company. We don’t own media. We don’t own music. We don’t own films or television. We’re not a media company. We’re just Apple.

Whatever you do, you must never let the voice in your head control the brain in your heart.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

If it could save a person’s life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.

The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They’re just like dead fish washing up on the shores.

It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans.

My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT , and I wonder about Apple.

It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for 10 years. That’s Apple’s problem: Their differentiation evaporated.

You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff. And if you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.

The HD revolution is over, it happened. HD won. Everybody wants HD.

digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, … – Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma) – Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven’t quite figured it out yet – tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

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.

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.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

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

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

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

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

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.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

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

Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simply.

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters 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.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

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.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

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.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

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 didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

And one more thing.

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.

We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

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.

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?’.

We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.

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.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

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.

So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with – born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic.

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

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.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product – the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

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?

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?

This is what customers pay us for – to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.

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.

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.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.

I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better.

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.

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.

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

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.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

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.

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.

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.

We think Android is very, very fragmented, and becoming more fragmented by the day. And as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator.

The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.

It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.

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

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

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.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

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.

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.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

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.

Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

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.

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.

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.

We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.

You’ll see more and more perfection of that – computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

There’s no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook.

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.

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.

The reason we wouldn’t make a seven-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit a price point, it’s because we don’t think you can make a great tablet with a seven-inch screen.

We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.

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 … 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. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

Again, 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.

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computer and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.

I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit. Now I’m a garbage can like everyone else. And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o’clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that’s why we’re called Apple.

There are times when you run a marathon and you wonder, Why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves

Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

Let’s make a dent in the universe

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path.

Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here?

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Focus and simplicity…once you get there, you can move mountains.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

Death is very likely the single best invention of life.

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.

I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It’s very character-building.

Pixar is the most technically advanced creative company; Apple is the most creatively advanced technical company.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.

We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make “me too” products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream.

You know we’re constantly taking. We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.

Don’t be afraid, you can do it.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.

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.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

You should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. […] It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. […] You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what’s driven me.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

We don’t settle for anything less than excellence.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex.

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

If a user is having a problem, it’s our problem.

I’m one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.

Believe that things will work out… follow your intuition and curiosity… trust your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path… You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future… The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it… Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

I try to get people to see what I have. . . . When you run a computer company, you have to get people to buy into your dreams.

The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do.

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.

Without death there would be very little progress.

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the team could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

I just had a romance that I really care about, a lot-I mean, a lot-go up in smoke. Because of the stress, and the sort of other woman that Macintosh is.

Make it like a sunflower.

You need to have a collaborative hiring process.

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers…..

But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.

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

We limit how much technology our kids use at home.

No one is going to buy a big phone.

I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

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.

I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.

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 know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail.

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.

I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.

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.

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.

So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.

I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than … intellectual, abstract understanding.

The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.

Good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind.’ It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

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.

If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.

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.

The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don’t quite know how to get to it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it’s within your grasp. And it’s worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence.

I know you have 1000 great ideas for things that iTunes could do. And we have 1000 more. But innovation is not about saying “yes” to everything. It’s about saying “no” to all but the most crucial features.

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.

I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.

I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.

There’s a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?

You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, 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.

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. That’s somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are.

It’s like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there’s some fundamental technology shift, it’s just over.

Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.

Bill Gates’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

Click. Boom. Amazing!

I mean, 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.

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 we 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.

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.

It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.

I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.

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.

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.

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.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you are doing.

Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.

The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.

I don’t think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career – it’s a life!

That’s why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. I think that’s one of Apple’s challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? I think we’ll do better, because we’re completely aware of it and we make it a priority.

I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight….

I told [Bill Gates] I believed every word of what I said but that I should never have said it in public. I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country…. I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this…. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

All we are is our ideas, or 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.

I’m sure a lot of you had this experience when you’re changing. You’re growing as a person and people tend to treat you like you were 18 months ago, and it’s really frustrating sometimes when you’re growing up and you’re more capable. It’s the same thing with a company and the press. The press is going to have a lag time. The best thing we can do about the press is embrace them and do the best thing we can to educate them about our strategy. But to keep our eye on the prize, that is turning out some great products. the press and the stock prize will take care of themselves.

In your life you only get to do so many things and right now we’ve chosen to do this, so let’s make it great.

The hardest thing when you think about focusing. You think focusing is about saying “Yes.” No. Focusing is about saying “No.” And when you say “No,” you piss off people.

I’m not dismissing the value of higher education; I’m simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.

I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product.

We’ve got to make the small things unforgettable.

You’ve got to have a problem that you want to solve; a wrong that you want to right.

You can’t look at the competition and say you’re going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you’re going to do it differently.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Making an enduring company was both harder and more important than making a great product.

Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.

And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits were the motivation.

Strategy is figuring out what not to do.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat

If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.

Sometimes life hits you like a brick in the face. Don’t give up.

Packaging can be theater, it can create a story

I want to make a dent in the universe…

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Your time on this earth is limited, don’t live someone else’s life, live by your vision.

The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it.

Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.

It’s the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, ‘here’s this great idea,’ then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.

Innovation distinguishes a leader from a follower.

The best way to create value in the 21st century is to connect Creativity with Technology

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Don’t be evil is a load of crap.

When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.

Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.

By honoring the lives of those we admire, we make our own values known.

I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.

We all have a short period of time on this earth-We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.

Pursue your dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks.

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Our job is to read things that are not yet on the page.

You have to have a lot of passion for what you do… because if you don’t, any rational person would give up.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

Don’t settle, as with all matters of the heart you’ll know when you find it

Overnight success stories take a long time.

Apple stores are intended not just to move boxes, but to enrich lives.

Innovation means saying ‘no’ to a thousand things.

I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.

Every good product I’ve ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves.

Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow.

We had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Customers don’t measure you on how hard you tried, they measure you on what you deliver.

One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner’s values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it’s a corporate partnership or a marriage.

And I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys [Bill Gates the other] on the planet because we found what we loved to do and we were at the right place at the right time and we’ve gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing.

We live in an information economy. The problem is that information’s usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.

The tragedy is that Dell didn’t win it – we lost it.

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?

When we hire someone, even if they are going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers.

Love what you do…Don’t settle

We believe people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. And we believe that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.

You’ve got to find what you love.

You have to trust in something-your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

You can tell a lot about a person by who his or her heroes are.

The day I was born songs were on records, phones were tied down, computers needed rooms and the web was fiction. Change the world. You can.

We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.

Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about 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.

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren’t many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money.

The most precious resource we have is time.

Don’t just live a life; build one.

That’s what makes great products. It’s not process-it’s content.

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work

Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same things you care about.

If you want to hire great people and have them stay, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.

The things I’ve done in my life have required a lot of years of work before they took off.

If today were my last day, would I do what I’m doing?…If the answer was ‘No’ too many days in a row, I’d make a change.

There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.

If you’re afraid of failing you won’t get very far

We don’t have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer… But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy.

I used to sleep on the floor in friends’ rooms, returning Coke bottles for food, money, and getting weekly free meals at a local temple

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.

Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don’t move products. Instead, enrich lives.

I buy everything from CostCo. It’s great; they’ve got everything I need.

This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us

This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.

I think the world’s a better place because Bill realized that his goal isn’t to be the richest guy in the cemetery, right?

I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.

Most people do not ever pick up the phone. They never ask, and that is what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn, because if you are afraid of failing, you will not get very far.

Without passion, any rational person would give up!

Life can be much broader. You can embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

Follow your heart, but check it with your head.

The most powerful person in the world is the story teller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

I admire Mark Zuckerberg… for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.

Don’t let the voice of other people’s opinion drown your inner voice.

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.

I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell of go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.

The were good times, there were hard times, but there were never bad times

My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules… That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.

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.

After all the statistics and calculations are formulated, the one element that breathes life into marketing is good design.

How can you get fired from the company you started?

Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.

Kick-start your brain. New ideas come from watching something, talking to people, experimenting, asking questions and getting out of the office!

LSD…reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.

To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.

Technology alone is not enough.

Computers are like a bicycle for our minds

To go forward you have to leave something behind

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

Everything is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.

You’ve heard of plug-and-play. This is plug, unplug and play. It’s so simple to use, it’s unbelievable.

I was lucky – I found what I love to do early in life,

Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

It [what you choose to do] has got to be something that you’re passionate about because otherwise you won’t have the perseverance to see it through.

Learn continually – there’s always “one more thing” to learn!

You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when you want to turn your brain on.

I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever. Anything we can do to help newspapers find new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for.

If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.

The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you’re lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it’s at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.

I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.

We have never worried about numbers. In the market place, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a differenceYou can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Each dream you leave behind is a part of your future that will no longer exist.

I have enough to last for the rest of my life.

Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.

I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success.

People need to have the incentive that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Otherwise they’ll stop investing.

None of us are as creative as all of us.

Let’s go invent tomorrow!

I make 50 cents for showing up… and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.

We do not say anything about future products. We work on them in secret, then we announce them.

What’s new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet – and no one’s gonna shut down the Internet.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.

I sat in a garage and invented the future.

Companies must have a noble cause, and it’s the leaders job to transform that noble cause into such an inspiring vision, that it will attract the most talented people in the world to want to join it.

Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.

If Macintosh hadn’t been successful, then I should have just thrown in the towel, because my vision of the whole industry would have been totally wrong.

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.

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.

iMac is next year’s computer for $1,299, not last year’s computer for $999.

There are sneakers that cost more than an iPod.

Mac OS X Tiger will come out long before Longhorn.

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.