“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. 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. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”
On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s
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Steve Jobs 150
American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc. 1955–2011Related quotes

“Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”
Variant: Life is an onion - you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.
Source: Remembrance Rock

“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”

I know there will be time for that later.
UK Sunday Times, 5/9/04

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 18
Context: From childhood we are trained to have problems. When we are sent to school, we have to learn how to write, how to read, and all the rest of it. How to write becomes a problem to the child. Please follow this carefully. Mathematics becomes a problem, history becomes a problem, as does chemistry. So the child is educated, from childhood, to live with problems — the problem of God, problem of a dozen things. So our brains are conditioned, trained, educated to live with problems. From childhood we have done this. What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. When a brain that is trained to have problems, and to live with problems, solves one problem, in the very solution of that problem, it creates more problems. From childhood we are trained, educated to live with problems and, therefore, being centred in problems, we can never solve any problem completely. It is only the free brain that is not conditioned to problems that can solve problems. It is one of our constant burdens to have problems all the time. Therefore our brains are never quiet, free to observe, to look. So we are asking: Is it possible not to have a single problem but to face problems? But to understand those problems, and to totally resolve them, the brain must be free.

As quoted in BusinessWeek (25 May 1998) http://www.businessweek.com/1998/21/b3579165.htm
1990s