“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”
“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.”
“My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”
“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.”
“That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”
“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.”
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
“I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
“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.”
