Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) appeared in numerous speaking engagements, interviews, media appearances, and product introductions throughout his life. He spoke about a vast array of subjects including technology, entrepreneurship, society, philosophy, education, communication, movies, music, television, role models, industry, etc.

Interviews, appearances, and speaking engagements

Year City Occasion Media Subject Matter
1980 Presentation donated to Computer History Museum[1] Video
  • Tools to amplify human ability. Computer is a bicycle for the mind
  • VisiCalc
  • Early word processors
  • Computing in education
  • Ease of use
  • Ratio of computers to users
  • Interactive software
  • Interactive video
  • The future of Apple Computer
  • Computing power applied to ease of use
  • Origin of Apple Computer name
  • Differences between hardware and software
  • Obsolescence
  • 500 employees
  • Sales dollars per employee
  • Maintaining creativity in the long term
1980 Cork, Ireland RTÉ Interview Video

1981 Cupertino, CA ABC 20/20 interview by Bob Brown at Apple offices 2/18/1981
1981 San Francisco, CA CBS Evening News; Barry Petersen interview
  • Life is seducing you into learning calculators, ATMs, and now desktop computers
  • It is not a Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish vision
  • It's going to be very gradual and very human
1981 Nightline; Ted Koppel Video
  • Invasion of privacy
  • Computer literacy
  • Children learning to use computers
1981 Cupertino, CA ABC News; Ken Kashiwahara
  • Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial risk culture
  • "The penalty for failure, for going and trying to start a company in this Valley is nonexistent. There really isn't a penalty for failure either psychologically or economically in the sense that, if you have a good idea and you go out to start your own company, even if you fail, you're generally considered worth more to the company you left because you've gained all this valuable experience, in many disciplines."

1982 Academy of Achievement Audio (YouTube)
  • Money does not define success
  • To be intelligent is to have a bird's eye view of the city while others are navigating the streets below.
  • The key to making connections that lead to innovation is to have a collection of out of the ordinary experiences to draw from.
  • Bright people are corralled onto a beaten path. Consider alternative paths.
  • Visit a third world country
  • Fall in love with two people at once
  • Walt Disney took LSD once and that's where the idea for Fantasia came from.
  • A variety of experiences will enable unique solutions.
  • Don't walk by a Zen Buddhist, buy him lunch.
  • The people that run the world aren't that different from you
  • The most ecstatic feeling is to give back to the pool of human innovation which we have all benefited from.
  • You inherit the responsibility to be a guardian of the earth.
1982 Boston, MA Applefest Audio (SoundCloud)
  • Steve Wozniak speaks about software protection
  • It's impossible to protect software.
  • Computer architecture requires that software is insecurely loaded into memory, enabling it to be copied out of memory.
  • Apple Computer consulted Martin Hellman and Ron Rivest cryptographers.
  • The issue of software protection goes away when economic and convenience demands are satisfied.
  • Growth of the computer marketplace will create competitive pressure on software prices.
  • Software distribution will transition from retail stores to electronic distribution "over telephone lines", improving convenience.
  • Similar issues exist with bootlegging in the record (music) industry and shoplifting in retail.
  • Consumers end up paying higher prices for sales lost to piracy.

1983 Aspen, Colorado International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) - 'The Future Isn't What It Used To Be' keynote
  • Computers are only 36 years old
  • Kids growing up now will be part of the computer generation
  • Computers are simple, adaptive, and fast
  • The oldest person with a degree in Computer Science is 39
  • Computers are very fast. They run a million instructions per second
  • Programmers build a collection of low level instructions into higher level instructions
  • Early electric motors of the late 1890s initially were large thus were applied to large scale applications. They didn't proliferate quickly
  • Later electric motors drove a shaft through a factory to empower multiple workstations simultaneously
  • The fractional horsepower electric motor was a breakthrough because it was applied to small individual applications
  • There are approximately 55 fractional horsepower motors in every household
  • The history of computers parallels the history of electric motors
  • ENIAC the first computer, was giant, hardly anyone got a chance to use it
  • A 1960s computing breakthrough was Time-sharing. Many people could share a large computer e.g. on a college campus
  • "The reason Apple exists is because we stumbled on to the fractional horsepower computer 5 years before anybody else."
  • "We made a computer that was about 13 pounds"
  • The first PC was invented in 1976. In 1983 the industry will ship 3 million personal computers
  • By 1986, we will ship more computers than automobiles in the USA
  • "...I need your help. If you've looked at computers, they all look like garbage. All of the great product designers are off designing automobiles/buildings but hardly any of them are designing computers."
  • The industry will sell 10 million computers whether they look ugly or great because people are going to be spellbound/elated
  • "It doesn't cost any more money to make it look great"
  • They are going to be these new objects that are going to be in everyone's working environment, educational environment, and home environment
  • "We have a shot at putting a great object there (work, school, home) and if we don't, we are going to put one more piece of junk object there"
  • By 1986 people will be spending two or three hours a day interacting with computers
  • Industrial design, the software design should be given the same consideration that we give automobiles if not a lot more
  • "Most of the objects of our life are not designed in America. We've blown it"
  • "Computers and society are out on a first date in the 80s."
  • "We have a chance to make these things beautiful. We have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves."
  • Apple alone will spend over 100 million dollars over the next 12 months on media advertising. IBM will spend at least that amount
  • The personal computer is a new medium of communication. One of the media. e.g. books, radio, television, newspapers
  • Computer communication is different from other mediums. Telephone demands both parties of a conversation be simultaneously present. Computers do not have this requirement.
  • "One of these days when we have portable computers with radio links, they can be walking around Aspen and retrieve it. (e-mail)"
  • "The process of communication changes as the mediums evolve."
  • When a new media emerges, we tend to fall back into old media habits
  • The first TV shows are basically radio shows with a television camera pointed at them
  • It took the better part of the 1950s for television to come 'into its own' as a medium
  • John F. Kennedy funeral television broadcast gave people a level of intensity that would not have been possible with radio
  • The Apollo program landing. That experience was not possible with the previous medium
  • It took 20 years for television to evolve away from radio
  • "Optical video discs" (Laserdisc) can store 55 thousand images on a side, or an hour of video randomly accessible. What are we using it for? Movies. We're dropping back into old media habits."
  • 5 to 10 years from now, random access storage will 'come into its own'
  • 1979 MIT experiment, Aspen Movie Map. A precursor of Google Street View is stored on laserdisc and reveals that random access storage will differentiate itself from other media
  • We are still running historic applications on personal computers e.g. business accounting, COBOL
  • Apple Lisa enables a person with little talent to draw artistic pictures, transmit them via e-mail
  • Computer programs are an idea expressed on paper. They enable thousands of individual experiences based on one set of underlying principles
  • Hamurabi video game. 7 year old kids are playing with a macro economic model. Interactive learning
  • Books were a way to learn without an intermediary teacher. "The problem was, you can't ask Aristotle a question."
  • Maybe in the next 50 to 100 years we will enable computer to capture an individual's underlying spirit, set of principles, world so that after they are gone we can ask the computer a question and receive an answer consistent with that individual
  • Ultimately computers are going to be used for communication and over the next 5 years the standards for interconnecting computers are going to evolve. They all speak different languages right now.
  • Early Xerox PARC local area network list server revealed special interest groups in the office. Soon there were more interest groups than there were employees.
  • As computers are networked (on the internet), they will facilitate the creation of special interest groups and bring together the people in those groups. (Social Networking)
  • Office local area network are about 5 years away
  • Home local area network are about 10 to 15 years away
  • "We want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes. That's what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so that you dont have to hook up to anything. So you are in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers."
  • Apple sets out "To design the computer that we want to put into the book eventually even though we cannot put it into the book now and it's called Lisa."
  • Apple Lisa is sold out for the first year
  • Eventually we will get to the point where people can create images as good as any other way.
1983 Hawaii Apple Sales meeting
  • In 1958 IBM fails to buy Xerox
  • 1968 IBM dismisses the DEC minicomputer as too small
  • 1977 Apple invents the Apple II, the first personal computer
  • IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small
  • 1981 Apple II is the world's most popular computer
  • Apple grows to a $300 million corporation, fastest growing corporation in American history
  • November 1981 IBM introduces the IBM PC
  • 1983 Apple and IBM computer industry's strongest competitors
  • 1983 Apple and IBM each sell $1 billion in personal computers
  • First major computer firm goes bankrupt. Total computer industry losses are larger than combined profits of Apple and IBM
  • 1984 Apple and IBM each invest $50 million in R&D
  • 1984 Apple and IBM each invest $50 million in TV advertising
  • 1984 computer dealers fear an IBM dominated marketplace
  • Was George Orwell right about 1984?
  • First presentation of the '1984' TV advertisement
  • Advertisement will run one week before Macintosh is introduced
  • Jay Chiat the principle of Chiat Day is in the audience
  • Lee Clow and Steve Hayden (wrote the ad copy) are in the audience

1984 Boston Boston Computer Society Video

1985 Playboy Magazine Interview[2]
  • Wealth
  • Idealism of the 1960s
  • Petrochemical Revolution brought free mechanical energy
  • Information Revolution brought free intellectual energy
  • Users don't need to understand the principles of a machine
  • Socratic education
  • "The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network."
  • Alexander Graham Bell
  • Telegraph took 40 hours to learn
  • Macintosh hardware took more than two years to design
  • Good PR educates people
  • Apple and IBM as computing standards
  • Merging of the telephone and the personal computer
  • Apple's roots are selling to people not Fortune 500s
  • Strategic mistakes of the Lisa computer division
  • Jobs was inexperienced at running a company
  • Sorrow over internal disagreements about the vision
  • The Macintosh represents Jobs's unrealized vision for the Lisa: a computer for people not corporations
  • 'Insanely great' people make 'insanely great' products for themselves, to their own highest standard
  • The Macintosh group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen
  • The IBM PC group lacked pride in their product and were motivated by money
  • Average age of Apple employees is 29
  • Most people in their 30s and 40s get stuck in their thought processes with rare exceptions
  • "Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work."
  • "Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies."
  • Dr. Edwin Land (founder of Polaroid) saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that
  • "...Dr. Land one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company‐‑which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of."
  • A visionary that brings together art and science is the most important thing to be, not a football player or astronaut
  • In 5 to 10 years John Sculley and Jobs intend to make Apple a 10 or 20 billion dollar company
  • That scale is merely to remain competitive. The bigger concern is how that scale is achieved.
  • Apple hires people that want to make large contributions today not await permission to do so years from now.
  • People/workers rarely get to contribute to the pool of innovation which we all rely upon.
  • Rather than focus on Fortune 500 customers, focus on how to change how small groups/businesses work.
  • There should not be one computing standard. Macintosh is clearly better than IBM. Innovation emerges via competition.
  • IBM will eventually crush companies that are compatible with their systems
  • To reach tens of millions of people, a computer that is significantly different from IBM is needed. Hence Macintosh.
  • IBM believes in service, support, security, mainframes, and 'motherhood'.
  • "Apple’s key observation three years ago was that when you’re shipping 10,000,000 computers a year, even IBM does not have enough mothers to ship one with every computer. So you’ve got to build motherhood into the computer."
  • If Apple makes a mistake and IBM wins, the world will enter a computer Dark Ages for 20 years.
  • Frito-Lay, a company that dominates a market via service and support and stifles newcomers in their market.
  • IBM dominated and therefore did not innovate in the mainframe industry for 15 years.
  • The IBM platform is a repackaging of dated Apple II level technology
  • Apple and IBM won't have much competition in the hardware space. The days of significant hardware start-ups are gone.
  • New, innovative companies will focus on software.
1985 Svaneholm Castle, Sweden Apple University Consortium Europe, Lund University with Håkan Westling
  • Computers can revolutionize education
  • Cooperation of European universities
  • Computer is a new medium among print, television, and radio
  • Initially, new mediums are based on old mediums
  • Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor
  • Petrochemical Revolution
  • Information Revolution
  • Free intellectual energy from computers
  • Computers will enable us to interact with Aristotles of the future
  • Henry Ford
  • "The automobile had a historical imperative"
  • Computers will forever change education as soon as 5 years from now
  • Jobs's dream is to sell Macintoshes to the Soviet Union
1985 Redwood City, CA and Pebble Beach, CA 'Entrepreneurs' documentary Video
  • NeXT Computer logo
  • Building a company
  • Leadership/communicating the vision
  • Product price
  • Delivery window
  • Financing/Expenses

1987 Pittsburgh, PA Interview with Connor Freff Cochran
  • Addressing the needs of higher education
  • Simulating historical models and making simulation building software
  • Taking time to observe the needs of a group of scholars in order to design and create productive tools
  • Delivering a paradigm shift in the curriculum of higher education for the first time since the 1960s.
  • Higher education introduces change to society

1988 Redwood City, CA NeXTStep demonstration of MIDI and quotation application
  • Demonstrates NeXTStep operating system
  • Humans are tool builders and have created tools such as the bicycle, telescope, language, and mathematics to amplify their inherent abilities.
  • Until 1988, computers have been used to revolutionize science and industry.
  • In 1988, computers have finally become powerful enough to have the same impact in the arts and humanities.
  • Digital libraries allow for searching through vast amounts of knowledge quickly such as the complete works of William Shakespeare in under a second.
  • Jobs is interested in the future and uses the digital library to search for quotes about it from George Orwell and Lincoln Steffens.
  • Having the knowledge of civilization accessible at our fingertips will be revolutionary in the humanities.
  • The computer has become good enough to synthesize music of quality to accompany human virtuoso violinist.
  • The music is synthesized from pure mathematics and created about a tenth of a second before it is heard. He gives an example of Johann Sebastian Bach's concerto in A minor.
1988 Boston, MA Boston Computer Society - Introduction of NeXT Computer Audio (SoundCloud)

1990s c. 1990s 'An Immigrant's Gift' documentary interview Video
1990 Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress with Stewart Brand Video
  • Library of Congress
  • We shouldn't build too many more libraries, instead we should connect towns to the internet to provide access to the Library of Congress
  • Video Games as simulated learning environments
  • The computer is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds
1990 Interview with WGBH-TV Video
1990 San Francisco, CA NeXTstation Keynote

1991 Redwood City, CA NeXT internal marketing strategy video
  • Identifying the target customer, why they choose their products over the competition, and what distribution channels will be used to reach them
  • The professional workstation market is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years.
  • The biggest players in the workstation market are Sun Microsystems, HP Apollo, DEC, and IBM with the RS/6000
  • Sun Microsystems is currently the major participant in this market with an 80% market share.
  • NeXT's competition don’t focus on user interface or have great third-party application software and are not machines for mere mortals
  • Market research data and industry experience suggest that the professional workstation market will grow to about 100,000 units in 1991 and triple to about 300,000 units in 1992
  • Customers are moving into the professional workstation category for three primary reasons: the need to write custom, mission-critical applications, the need for sophisticated networking capabilities, and the need for database-driven applications that communicate with SQL databases running on an IBM mainframe or on a Sequent machine running Oracle or Sybase.
  • NeXT’s key competitive strengths against Sun are their superior development environment, their suite of productivity apps, and their focus on interpersonal computing.
  • NeXT is well positioned to compete against Sun in the professional workstation market due to their multimedia and ease of use features which provide superior interpersonal computing results.
  • NeXT’s development environment is vastly superior to Sun’s, as decided by customers’ best technical people when they return from NeXT’s software camp. Developers who go through NeXT’s software camp will go back raving about NeXTSTEP and telling their own management that NeXTSTEP will allow them to build their custom app three times faster than Sun.
  • NeXT’s productivity app suite dwarfs that of Sun and includes breakthrough apps such as Lotus Improv and WYSIWYG WordPerfect. Once customers are in the professional workstation category, the productivity app comparison is no longer against PCs and Macs, it’s against Sun and NeXT is winning hands down.
  • Interpersonal computing improves group productivity and collaboration through the use of sophisticated desktop computers and will be the largest reason people are buying NeXT computers within 24 months.
  • Regis McKenna once said "the best marketing is education".
1991 Portland, Oregon Reed College Howard Vollum Award acceptance speech
1991 Redwood City, CA The state of the industry on the 10th anniversary of the IBM PC

Video (Youtube)

1992 Cambridge, MA MIT Sloan Distinguished Speaker Series Video (Youtube)

1993 Redwood City, CA Interview on Paul Rand Video

1994 Redwood City, CA Steve Jobs in 1994: The Rolling Stone Interview Text (Archive.org)
1994 Santa Clara Valley Historical Association Silicon Valley Documentary

1995 Redwood City, CA Steve Jobs: 'The Lost Interview'; Robert X. Cringely
1995 Redwood City, CA Smithsonian Oral History Project Interview
1995 Los Angeles, CA SIGGRAPH 1995 Keynote Speech
  • Centenary of the motion picture
  • Scale and complexity of Toy Story
  • Place in History of Computer Graphics
  • Lumière brothers projected the first film 100 years ago in Paris
  • How has technology changed the way we view motion pictures?
  • 1895 Lumière brothers invented their own cameras and projectors
  • 1927 the next technological innovation was sound (almost 40 years later)
  • Al Jolson's lines ended the era of silent pictures forever
  • The impact of sound: 60 million movie viewers in 1927 to 110 million viewers in 1929
  • The Jazz Singer was immensely popular and saved Warner Bros. studio
  • 1932 The next major innovation was Technicolor
  • 1937 first animated feature film with multiplane camera
  • 2D Animation was the first new form of motion picture entertainment since the first motion picture 42 years earlier
  • 1939 The Wizard of Oz became the first commercially successful color film
  • 1977 Star Wars redefined science fiction genre. Elevated special effects to become an equal partner to live action in storytelling in motion pictures
  • Alien, The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park incorporate some computer graphics special effects (but not on the scale of Toy Story)
  • Scale and complexity of Toy Story
  • Toy Story is the first completely computer generated feature-length motion picture. Completely computer synthetic.
  • Computer graphics are not just providing a supporting role to live action but are actually providing the entire vision for the motion picture.
  • Pixar created a 'digital back (movie) lot'
  • Jobs details the workflow of creating animated movies followed by numerous statistics about Toy Story
  • 10 person-years went into the modeling of Toy Story
  • 34 terabytes of RenderMan files were rendered
  • 800 thousand machine hours of rendering on Sun SPARCstation 20 quad processors
  • Woody has 723 animation control points. 58 on the mouth alone.
  • Buzz Lightyear has over 600 textures
  • One scene has over 1 million leaves rendered on trees
  • Toy story is the classic 'buddy picture'. Two adversaries forced to work together by circumstance.
  • (The SIGGRAPH computer graphics) community has finally achieved the creation of a feature-length 3D animated synthetic film
  • (The SIGGRAPH computer graphics community) pioneered the next major offshoot of the motion picture (3D Animation) "It's going to be a medium in its own right."

1996 La Télé Christophe Rasch interview with Steve Jobs Video
1996 NPR: Steve Jobs's 1996 Conversation with Terry Gross Audio
  • World Wide Web, HTML
  • Tracking Packages
  • Static vs. Dynamic Web Publishing
  • Electronic commerce
  • WebObjects
  • Bypassing middlemen with the Web. Direct to consumer sales
  • Web as egalitarian medium
  • Shopping for information
  • Online software sales in the future
  • Broadband in the home
  • The Web has resources for special interest groups. e.g. online health advice
  • Xerox PARC in 1979. GUI, Object-oriented programming, and Networking
  • NeXT Computer, now strictly a software company
  • NASA Ames Research Center
  • Jobs programmed in Fortran, BASIC
  • Steve Wozniak
  • Blue Box
  • Apple I
  • Printed circuit board
  • The Byte Shop
  • Marxian profit realization crisis
  • One button mouse on the Mac
  • SRI
  • Graphical user interface
  • Pain of departing Apple
  • Not being afraid to fail
  • Apple's 10 year lead over Microsoft in 1985
  • Apple stopped innovating
  • Cost cutting is not the solution to Apple's troubles
  • Apple was like Jobs's first love
  • Apple's "major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers."
  • The motivation of bringing ease of use to the Macintosh was to bring fonts/typography, graphics, photographs
  • Science including computer science is a liberal art
  • Everyone should have a mastery of computer science to some extent
  • The seed of Apple was "Computers for the rest of us."
  • "Microsoft didn't really get it." (that computers should be for everyone and easy to use)
  • "Are we entering a time window when we might see the first successful post-PC devices?"
  • The future of the personal digital assistant and Internet appliances
  • Collegial vs. Hierarchical corporate culture
  • Apple is an egalitarian company. Great ideas could come from anywhere within Apple.
  • "[Apple] hired truly great people, and gave them the room to do great work."
  • "A lot of companies hired people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do."
  • "[Work] is still my life but it is not all of my life."
  • Ed Catmull, Lucasfilm
  • Founding Pixar
  • Jobs provided the support, negotiations, and environment to make Toy Story possible
  • Pixar as a consumer of computing power vs. a creator of computing power

1997 San Diego, CA WebObjects presentation at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (MSPDC) Video
1997 San Francisco, CA MacWorld Expo 1997 Video
1997 San Francisco, CA WWDC Fireside Chat with Steve Jobs Video
1997 CNBC interview with Steve Jobs Video
  • Apple stock is trading at 1/3x sales. Competitors trade at 3-5x sales.
  • Jobs return to Apple
  • Compensation
  • Focussing the company's resources on core products and a few new products.
  • Microsoft and Apple relationship
  • Macintosh was the platform that brought Microsoft into the Applications business
  • Being CEO is not a popularity contest

1998 10th Anniversary of Wolfram Mathematica Video
1998 San Jose, CA WWDC
1998 Cupertino, CA Original iMac Press Interview
  • The iMac is a powerful computer designed for easy internet use.
  • It’s faster than many PCs and has a unique design inspired by the Jetsons cartoon.
  • It doesn’t have a floppy disk drive. Research showed that only a small percentage of people still use floppy disks, and their use is fading away. Software now comes on CD-ROMs, and people are using the internet for file sharing. Removable storage devices like Zip drives are available for the iMac if needed.
  • Apple received 150,000 pre-orders for the iMac in the first week.
  • There is a lot of interest from developers. Many new applications have been announced for MacOS.
  • The iMac uses the USB standard for connecting peripherals.
  • Apple is targeting several different sets of customers with the iMac, including their existing installed base, new users entering the market, and customers who have switched to other platforms.
  • Apple has a marketing campaign for the iMac that includes TV ads, an outdoor campaign, and a 12-page insert in consumer magazines.
  • Some people may not see the iMac as revolutionary, but Apple has come a long way in a year and is now ahead of the market.
  • iMac represents a significant step forward for Apple and for personal computing in general. Its combination of power, ease of use, and design make it an attractive option for many different types of users.
1998 Seattle, WA CAUSE Annual Conference General Session Video

1999 San Francisco, CA Macworld Expo San Francisco Keynote
1999 Tokyo, Japan MacWorld Expo Tokyo Keynote
1999 San Francisco, CA Seybold Conference Keynote

2001 Japan Japanese National Public Broadcasting Organization interview
  • If you are going to start something new, you have to have passion for it
  • People that succeed don't give up.
  • The personal computer is entering its third great age
  • The first age of the PC was productivity (ca. 1980)
  • The second age was the internet (ca. 1994)
  • The third age is the digital lifestyle (ca. 2001) fueled by devices like the camcorder, cameras, dvd players, cell phones.
  • It took a year to realize that the PC would become a major industry
  • Steve Wozniak did most of the engineering on the Apple I and Apple II.
  • At first, we made the computer kits for our friends
  • The circle of friends got bigger and bigger. Now its 25 million people.
  • Money is not a good reason to start a company
  • Start a company to express an idea. Sometimes that's the only way to get people to listen.
  • You permeate values to employees by example, ultimately.
  • When a product is not quite good enough, we try to stop what we are doing and make it great before we ship it.
  • Employees and others observe how senior management handle problems with products.
  • "Everybody watches very carefully when you are in a difficult situation, what decisions you make, what values you have."
  • We try to hire very smart people. We have a very simple organization and focus on doing very few things well.
  • "Focussing does not mean saying yes, it means saying no." We decide to do very few things.
  • People want to do something great, be excited about what they do, and be recognized for their work.
  • Its very motivating to envision a project in the hands of up to 25 million people
  • We try to allow people to do the best work of their lives.
  • Because others copy Apple, Apple can influence the whole industry beyond the 25 million Apple users.
  • Apple is in a great spot today, 3 or 4 years ago it was fragile.
  • Apple has focussed on the internet for the last 6–7 years.
  • "I love the internet but the internet has no emotion to it. Its very intellectual." It is only one thing we can do with computers.
  • Most people don't have the internet bandwidth to deliver emotion.
  • "To deliver emotion, you have to have higher bandwidth."
  • At Apple, we want to stand at the intersection of technology and humanities.
  • We want to bring the humanist side into these tools. We don't just want to serve the intellectual side.
  • There are a lot of forces in life that tend to funnel us down into an institutionalized path where people forget that they are very unique.
  • The whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side and just focus on the technology.
  • A lot of our industry just focusses on more is better. More "megahertz and megabytes" we call it "feeds and speeds".
  • We can do more with computers than just spreadsheets and word processors.
  • We want to help you express yourself in richer ways in your music, movies, photography.
  • Instead of storing unwatched videotapes, you want to edit them down into a little movie that you can share with others.
  • (You don't have to be creative to emotionally express yourself.) We have had over a million customers make movies with iMovie.
  • The whole personal computer industry has not previously addressed the emotional and creative side of people. It has only spoken to the side of us that is calculating numbers.
  • At last, with this digital lifestyle era opening, we are going to address some of these (emotional applications of computers).
  • I visualize things at most about 1 to 4 years down the road.
  • Some 5 year planning is essential, but most 5 year planning changes within a few years.
2001 Cupertino, CA iPod (1st generation) introduction at Apple One Infinite Loop campus

2002 60 Minutes Overtime Video
  • Analog generation loss
  • George Lucas
  • Lucas hired Edwin Catmull from New York Institute of Technology
  • Jobs bought computer group from Lucas in 1986 with a vision to create the world's first computer generated animated film
  • The Beatles as an example of a team
  • Business is best executed as a team effort
  • My greatest strength is hanging out with great and talented people
  • All of us need to be on guard against arrogance
  • There wouldn't have been a Pixar if Jobs had not been fired from Apple
  • Returning to Apple after being fired 12 years earlier was an example of the circle of life
  • Computer industry is in its infancy

2005 Palo Alto, CA Stanford Commencement Address Text

Video

2006 New York City CNBC interview about Apple Fifth Avenue opening
  • Apple opened its first retail store 5 years ago
  • SoHo Apple store was one of the most expensive to build
  • There was demand for a second Manhattan store
  • Real estate developer Harry Macklowe invited Apple to a subterranean space under a Fifth Avenue plaza
  • Apple proposed a 32-foot glass cube
  • "We've never believed in the philosophy of having flagship stores that don't make money."
  • "Every single one of our stores makes money."
  • New Fifth Avenue store is first Apple Store to be open 24 hours
  • 300 employees will work in the store. We are highly service oriented.
  • We want to invest more to create a better buying experience
  • We only have to convince 5% of the world to buy a Mac and we will have doubled our market share.
  • iPods are extremely successful in the UK. We are the number one MP3 player in France, Germany, etc. in Europe.
  • AMD has got some very interesting products at the high end of the server space
  • Intel has the best consumer chips right now. Yonah known as the Core Duo.
  • Intel has a strong road map for notebooks and consumer desktops.
  • Will we ever see an "'iPhone'"? We never talk about unannounced products.
2006 Cupertino, California Presents new plan for new campus to Cupertino City Council Video

2007 San Francisco, CA CNBC Interview on the release of the iPhone Video
2007 Emeryville, CA Interview about Pixar
  • Ed Catmull
  • I bought into the dream of making the first computer-animated film both spiritually and financially
  • The combination of a new medium and John Lasseter bringing a character to life made people say, "Oh my god!"
  • Just trying to pay the bills and buy time was a failing strategy.
  • Second product syndrome: Often a second product that follows an earlier successful product, will fail because of the misunderstanding of why the initial product succeeded.
  • The Apple II was Apple's first product in the marketplace. It was incredibly successful. The Apple III was a dud.
  • "My feeling was that if we got through our second film, we'd make it."
  • "Our business depends on unplanned collaboration."
  • "We want to put everybody under one roof and we want to encourage unplanned collaboration."
  • "If you look closely, most overnight successes took a long time."
  • "The best scientists and engineers are just as creative as the best storytellers."

2008 San Jose, CA US SEC Deposition

2010 San Francisco, CA Introduction of the first generation iPad at a 'Special Event' at YBCA
2010 San Francisco, CA WWDC Introduction of the iPhone 4 and FaceTime

2011 Cupertino, California Presents the plan for the new Apple Campus Video
  • June 11, 2011 - Last Steve Jobs public appearance.
  • Apple is growing and is out of space. Need a new campus to augment existing campus.
  • Jobs called Bill Hewlett for help at age 12 and received a summer job building frequency counters.
  • New Apple campus will be on the former HP Computer Systems division
  • Prior to being an HP campus this land was an apricot orchard.
  • Hired the best architects and intend to put 12,000 people in one building
  • The building is "kind of like a spaceship landed.".
  • The building will be curved and this is expensive.
  • Apple already makes the biggest pieces of glass for architectural use.
  • The HP site is 80% parking lot and 20% landscape.
  • The Apple campus will be 80% landscape and 20% buildings.
  • Hired senior arborist from Stanford to plant trees.
  • Parking will be subterranean.
  • Building is four stories high. "We want the whole place to be human scale."
  • The campus will be self powered and backed up by the grid
  • The use of space is dramatically improved over the HP campus.
  • 20% more work space than on the HP campus.
  • 350% more landscape than on the HP campus.
  • 60% more trees than the HP campus
  • 90% less pavement than the HP campus
  • The cafe will feed 3000 people in a sitting.
  • Apple is the largest tax payer in Cupertino
  • Apple moving away would not be good for Cupertino
  • Apple employs very talented people which improves Cupertino
  • Apple has biodiesel buses that (in 2011) were the cleanest buses.
  • Architecture students will come to Cupertino to see this building.
  • Employment will increase by about 20%.
  • Both of my (adopted) parents died of Lung cancer from smoking
  • Break ground in 2012
  • "We want to move in in 2015.".
2011 60 Minutes (Posthumous) Video
  • Definitely taking LSD was one of the most important things in my life

See also

How to Grow an Apple: Did Steve Jobs Speak Apple to Success? Aalborg University, Lotte Skjøttgaard Sørensen, 2013

References

  1. ^ "Computer History Museum - Steve Jobs".
  2. ^ The Playboy Interview: Moguls. Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
  3. ^ "Beloved dean played key role in the life of Steve Jobs". Reed Magazine. Retrieved 6 December 2016.
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