Steve Jobs Quotes

181 Sourced Quotes

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.

Steve Jobs
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.'

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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
It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell!

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers…..

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

Steve Jobs
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... [reveals that the system he had been using for the presentation was running Mac OS X 10.4.1 on a machine using a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor] So.. we've been running on an Intel machine all morning.

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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.

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

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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.

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

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

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
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
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.

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs
Nobody has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.

Steve Jobs
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.

Steve Jobs