Steve Jobs Quotes (150 quotes, page 3) | Quotes of famous people

“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.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in The Guts of a New Machine (30 November 2003) https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-new-machine.html
2000s

People , Feeling , Thinking , Box

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

Steve Jobs

2000s, WWDC 2005

Time

“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.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Fortune (18 September 1995)
1990s

Perfection

“Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
Playboy: Meaning what?
Jobs: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. 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. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, as quoted in “Steve Jobs Imagines 'Nationwide' Internet in 1985 Interview” https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-imagines-nationwide-internet-in-1985-intervi-1671246589, Matt Novak, 12/15/14 2:20pm Paleofuture, Gizmodo.
1980s

People , World , Faith , Way

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

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Newsweek (29 October 2001), "The Classroom Of The Future" http://archive.is/20130104221536/www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2001/10/28/the-classroom-of-the-future.html
2000s
Variant: I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

“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.”

Steve Jobs

Interview about the release of the Macintosh (24 January 1984) - (online video) http://pulsar.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/graphics/movies/sj84.mov
1980s

Dreams

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what's most surprising to you?
Jobs: 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. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time.”

Steve Jobs

1990s

People , World , Way , Feeling

“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.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Fortune (19 February 1996)
1990s

War , Business , Time

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

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer
2000s
Variant: I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year… It's very character-building.

Personality

“Real artists ship.”

Steve Jobs

An old saying at Apple Computer, attributed to Steve Jobs, meaning that it is important to actually deliver. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RealArtistsShip
1980s

“It'll make your jaw drop.”

Steve Jobs

On the first NeXT Computer, as quoted in The New York Times (8 November 1989)
1980s

“Click. Boom. Amazing!”

Steve Jobs

MacWorld "Intel Inside" keynote address (January 2006)
2005-09

“And one more thing…”

Steve Jobs

A phrase he has famously used in making announcements of products towards the end of many of his presentations, as quoted in "How to Wow 'Em Like Steve Jobs" in BusinessWeek magazine (6 April 2006) http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2006/sb20060406_865110.htm
2000s

“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. ”

Steve Jobs

“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.”

Steve Jobs

Mountain , Thinking , Making love

“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. 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. … The world's clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We've given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.”

Steve Jobs

1990s, Rolling Stone interview (1994)

Money , Faith , People , World

“Last quarter, we had our best Mac quarter ever. We shipped 1.33 million Macs last quarter. We are really, really happy about this, but even better, was the growth rate because the growth rate was dramatically faster than the rest of the industry which means we are gaining market share.”

Steve Jobs

2000s, WWDC 2006

Happiness , Relation ships

“If you have a chance to go to New York I really encourage to go visit the store. This is one of the fifty-seven we now have.”

Steve Jobs

2000s, WWDC 2006

Chance

“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. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."”

Steve Jobs

It was their farewell message as they signed off. 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. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Personality , Life , Age , Country

“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. 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.”

Steve Jobs

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Making love , People , Way , Life

“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. 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.”

Steve Jobs

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Life , Dead , Making love , Help

“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.”

Steve Jobs

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Light , Life , Success

“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.
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.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004)
2000s

Night , People , Problem , Thinking

“How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build 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. 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. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Steve Jobs

1980s, Playboy interview (1985)

Sleep , Night , Beauty , People

“The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?"”

Steve Jobs

he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. … It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. 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. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.
1980s, Playboy interview (1985)

People , Parting

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

Steve Jobs

On why he delayed the Leopard OS in favor of developing the iPhone rather than hiring more developers, at the annual Apple stockholder's meeting (10 May 2007) as quoted in "Apple's Jobs brushes aside backdating concerns" at c|net News (10 May 2007) http://archive.is/20130628220833/http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6182965.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news
As quoted in "Apple iPhone: more secrets revealed" (11 May 2007) http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/mac/news/apple-iphone-jobs-spills-more-secrets?articleid=1431998781
2000s
Variant: I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check … if so, then Microsoft would have great products.

“People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!'”

Steve Jobs

That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
As quoted in The Guts of a New Machine (30 November 2003) https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-new-machine.html
2000s

Thinking , Box , People , Making love

“People say sometimes, "You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world."”

Steve Jobs

I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time.
1990s, Rolling Stone interview (1994)

World , People

“By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”

Steve Jobs

Source: Republished email to Gawker's Ryan Tate, May 2010 https://web.archive.org/web/20100919141354/http://gawker.com/5539717/

Way , Motivation