Designers

"When we know those moments, when we smile, when we let go, when we are not on guard at all – these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it – for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed."

"...the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things [are] made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized."

"A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes."

"...every pattern we define must be formulated in the form of a rule which establishes a relationship between a context, a system of forces which arises in that context, and a configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves in that context."

"...we have so far beset ourselves with rules, and concepts, and ideas of what must be done to make a building or a town alive, that we have become afraid of what will happen naturally, and convinced that we must work within a "system" and with "methods" since without them our surroundings will come tumbling down in chaos."

"Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmision from person to person."

"...a great architect's creative power, his capacity to make something beautiful, lies in his capacity to observe correctly, and deeply. A painter's talent lies in his capacity to see – he sees more acutely, more precisely, what it is that really matters in a thing, and where its qualities come from."

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

"Jobs was a practicing Buddhist and his computers are directly inspired by Tibetan Buddhist dialectics."

"Bill Gates: Jobs was a genius, what he did, particularly when he came back to Apple... no one else could do what he did there. I couldn’t have done that. He was such a wizard at over-motivating people — I was a minor wizard so I couldn’t fall under his spell — but I could see him casting the spell. I was so jealous."

"He wanted you to be great, and he wanted you to create something that was great, and he was going to make you do that."

"When I wasn't sure what the word "charisma" meant, I met Steve Jobs, and then I knew."

"Aaron Sorkin: My point is that Steve could make these products and make them likable, slip them under the door, and people would slip back a tray of food. It worked. He was right. That cult of Apple, this love for Steve — when he died, I was overwhelmed by the eulogizing, which I hadn’t seen since John Lennon. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really understand it, even though I was asked to eulogize him for Time magazine and accepted. But I thought, There’s something I’m not getting here, but plainly I should — I’ve missed something."

"Vulture: Were you always interested in Steve Jobs?"

"Steve Jobs was the best marketeer at the intersection of science and art that existed in the 20th century ... he understood not just marketing and not just technology, but how to sell incredibly technical products to your mother, who would never care about bits, bytes, RAM’s, ROM’s, or whatever."

"The most telling lesson to be learned from Jobs’s example might be summed up by inverting one of his favorite marketing slogans: Think Indifferent. That is, care only about the product, not the myriad producers, whether factory workers in China or staff members in Cupertino, or colleagues like Wozniak, Kottke, and Tevanian, who had been crucial to Apple’s success."

"One lesson many people took from the Steve Jobs story is that great entrepreneurs can anticipate what their customers want even before they ask for it."

"If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. … Let’s be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?"

"I never really get to see, except second hand, how abrupt he is with people. I couldn't be that way with people. But maybe that's what you need to run a business, to find things that are worthless and get rid of them."

"Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.… In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules."

"[as an interview was taking place] I could tell that Steve was losing patience when he started to roll his eyes at the candidate's responses. Steve began to grill him with some unconventional questions."How old were you when you lost your virginity?", Steve askedThe candidate wasn't sure if he heard correctly. "What did you say?"Steve repeated the question, changing it slightly. "Are you a virgin?". Burrell and I started to laugh, as the candidate became more disconcerted. He didn't know how to respond.Steve changed the subject. "How many times have you taken LSD?"The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straight-forward technical question. But when he started to give a long-winded response, Steve got impatient again."Gooble, gobble, gobble, gobble", Steve started making turkey noises. This was too much for Burrell and myself, and we all started cracking up. "Gobble, gobble, gobble", Steve continued, laughing himself now.At this point, the candidate stood up. "I guess I'm not the right guy for this job", he said."I guess you're not", Steve responded. "I think this interview is over.""

"He is a prime example of a manager who takes the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the workers when deadlines are not met."

"Jobs also has favorites, who can do no wrong--and others can do no right. He will uncritically dismiss an idea saying: "Oh, that's X's idea. His ideas aren't worth anything.""

"Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea was a good one he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own."

"He does not give credit where due. This is an especially damaging trait in a company that depends on innovation for its surival."

"He acts without thinking and with bad judgment."

"Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-known as to be almost a running joke. It's not funny, hurts Apple's image when he does it to outsiders, and wastes our time and energy when it is done to another employee."

"I have always liked Steve personally, but I have found it impossible to work for him and retain much enjoyment in my work."

"While Mr. Jobs's stated positions on management techniques are all quite noble and worthy, in practice he is a dreadful manager."

"Jobs: It's dead, right? Yeah, well, you know, let me say something that's sort of generic. I know some of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. I feel your pain!"

"[audience groans and laughs]"

"Jobs: What about OpenDoc? Yeah...what about it?"

"Man in audience: What about OpenDoc?"

"Jobs: [audible gasps from the audience] Uh... You know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but...One of the hardest things, when you're trying to affect change, is that people like this gentlemen are right in some areas. I'm sure there are some things OpenDoc does, probably even more that I'm not familiar with, that nothing else out there does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small commercial app, that demonstrates those things. The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that's gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars - 10 billion dollars of product a year?One of the things I've always found is that 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 try to sell it. I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it's the case. As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with "What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?" not starting with, "Let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that. And I think that's the right path to take.I remember, with the LaswerWriter - we built the world's first laser printer, as you know, and there was awesome technology in that box. We had the first Canon cheap laser printing engine in the United States. We had a very wonderful printer controller, we had Adobe's PostScript software in there, we had AppleTalk in there, just awesome technology in the box. And I remember seeing the first print-out come out of it. Just picking it up and looking at it, and thinking, "You know, we can sell this." Because you don't need to know anything about what's in that box. All we have to do is hold it up and go, "do you want this?" And if you can remember back to 1984 before laser printers, it was pretty startling to see that. People went, "Whoah. Yes."That's where Apple's gotta get back to. I'm sorry that OpenDoc is a casualty along the way, and I readily admit there's many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about. So I apologize for that too. But there's a whole lot of people working super, super hard right now at Apple. You know - Avie, John, Guerrino, Fred, I mean the whole team is working - burning the midnight oil, and hundreds of people below them - to execute on some of these things, and they're doing their best.And some mistakes will be made along the way, by the way. That's good. Because at least some decisions are being made. We'll find the mistakes, and we'll fix 'em. And I think what we need to do is support that team. Going through this stage, as they work their butts off - they're all getting calls to go do this, do that, the valley's hot - none of them are leaving. And I think we need to support them, and see them through this, and write some damn good applications out in the market.Mistakes will be made, some people will be pissed off, some people will not know what they're talking about, but I think it's so much better than where things were not very long ago. And I think we're gonna get there."

"Man at the audience microphone: It's sad and clear that on several counts you've discussed you don't know what you're talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms, how, say Java, in any of its incarnations, expresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when you've finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years."

"Jobs: Here it comes [audience laughter]."

"Man at audience microphone: Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man."

"The musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."

"My girlfriend always laughs during sex — no matter what she's reading."

"Good artists copy; great artists steal."

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."

"You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest…. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do — keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying."

"I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was OK and to thank her, because I'm glad I didn't end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me."

""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."

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

"Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices."

"- 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"

"From: Steve Jobs To: Steve Jobs Subject: Date: September 2, 2010, 11:08 p.m. I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being. Sent from my iPad"

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

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