In times when uncertainty plagues the world, taking solace in the words of a leader can be an oasis of inspiration that drives us forward. In this article, we’ll go over 112 quotes by Steve Jobs on different topics that include quotes about life, people, business, money, design and technology.
Quotes About Life:
Steve Jobs shared several valuable insights regarding the way he thought about life and how to approach the challenges that arise along the way. Let’s review some of them…
1-
“I was lucky, I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees”
-Steve Jobs
Watch how Jobs shares this quote during his commencement speech at Stanford at 5:41 right here:
2-
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown 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.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch Steve share this quote at 12:31 right here:
3-
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death. Leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die, is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you’ve got something to lose.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch Steve talk about this topic right here at 9:39:
4-
“I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren’t random”
-Steve Jobs
5-
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time”
-Steve Jobs
6-
“Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future”
-Steve Jobs
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7-
“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again”
-Steve Jobs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvEiSa6_EPA
8-
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him share this quote as he delivers a commencement speech at Stanford:
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9-
“My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. This was the start in my life.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him share this story about his life over here (starts at 1:50)
10-
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
-Steve Jobs
11-
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch Steve share this quote during his Stanford commencement speech at 5:07:
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12-
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
-Steve Jobs
You can watch him share this quote right here:
13-
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch Steve explain the idea and spirit behind this quote in a conference with Apple employees over here:
14-
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
-Steve Jobs
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15-
“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”
-Steve Jobs
16-
“I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back”
-Steve Jobs
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17-
“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”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him share this valuable insight at 11:53 right here:
18-
“I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all”
-Steve Jobs
19-
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? Whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him share this quote right here (starts at 9:27)
20-
“Things don’t have to change the world to be important”
-Steve Jobs
21-
“Stay hungry, stay foolish”
-Steve Jobs
Jobs explains the story behind the publication that inspired him to share this quote right here (starts at 13:08)
Quotes About People:
As a business leader, Jobs had a talent for inspiring and motivating his teams, and the following set of quotes convey some of the most important lessons he learned during his career…
22-
“Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?”
-Steve Jobs
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23-
“I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together”
-Steve Jobs
24-
“We hire people who want to make the best things in the world”
-Steve Jobs
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25-
“Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields”
-Steve Jobs
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26-
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want”
-Steve Jobs
27-
“It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long”
-Steve Jobs
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28-
“It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people”
-Steve Jobs
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29-
“As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids”
-Steve Jobs
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30-
“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals”
-Steve Jobs
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Quotes About Business:
The next set of quotes talks about some of the lessons Jobs learned about the business world and how navigate it. Let’s see…
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31-
“I never found anybody who didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.”
-Steve Jobs
(0:16 to 0:20)
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32-
“Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask; and that’s what separates sometimes, the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. You gotta act, and you’ve got to be willing to fail, you gotta be willing to crash and burn. With people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever, if you are afraid of failing you won’t get very far.”
-Steve Jobs
Watch Steve talk about this from 1:07 to 1:41 in this video:
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33-
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones in pure perseverance”
-Steve Jobs
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34-
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles”
-Steve Jobs
35-
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
-Steve Jobs
36-
“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
-Steve Jobs
37-
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
-Steve Jobs
38-
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
-Steve Jobs
39-
“Throughout the years in business, I found something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers you invariably get are: ‘Oh, that’s just the way it’s done.’ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him share this business insight at 18:01 right here:
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40-
“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else
wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”
-Steve Jobs
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41-
“I get asked a lot why Apple’s customers are so loyal. It’s not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That’s ridiculous”
-Steve Jobs
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42-
“Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business”
-Steve Jobs
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43-
“Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest”
-Steve Jobs
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44-
“Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?”
-Steve Jobs
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45-
“To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines”
-Steve Jobs
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46-
“Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes”
-Steve Jobs
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47-
“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
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48-
“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important”
-Steve Jobs
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49-
“We’ve demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don’t let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don’t allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we’d like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future”
-Steve Jobs
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50-
“Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simply”
-Steve Jobs
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51-
“Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
-Steve Jobs
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52-
“It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.”
-Steve Jobs
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53-
“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets”
-Steve Jobs
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54-
“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.
55-
“I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”
-Steve Jobs
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56-
“The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient”
-Steve Jobs
57-
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have”
-Steve Jobs
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58-
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
-Steve Jobs.
59-
“And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any
of us here”
-Steve Jobs
60-
“I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better”
-Steve Jobs
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61-
“Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer”
-Steve Jobs
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62-
“Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”
-Steve Jobs
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63-
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
-Steve Jobs
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64-
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
-Steve Jobs
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65-
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
-Steve Jobs
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66-
“Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday”
-Steve Jobs
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67-
“If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does”
-Steve Jobs
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68-
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it”
-Steve Jobs
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69-
“And one more thing”
-Steve Jobs
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Quotes About Money:
The co-founder of Apple experienced financial success early in life and learned quite a bit about the vicissitudes of being rich. The following set of quotes give us a glimpse into his personality…
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70-
“You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me”
-Steve Jobs
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71-
“I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback”
-Steve Jobs
Watch as Steve shares his point of view about money on this clip:
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72-
“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”
-Steve Jobs
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73-
“So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective”
-Steve Jobs
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74-
“Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence”
-Steve Jobs
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Quotes About Design:
Steve had very strong and specific points of view when it came to his design philosophy. The following quotes show us a glimpse of his way of thinking…
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75-
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. – Steve Jobs”
-Steve Jobs
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76-
“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”
-Steve Jobs
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77-
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
-Steve Jobs
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78-
“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.”
-Steve Jobs
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79-
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
-Steve Jobs
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80-
“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.”
-Steve Jobs
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81-
“Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together”
-Steve Jobs
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82-
“It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now”
-Steve Jobs
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83-
“For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through”
-Steve Jobs
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84-
“I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating”
-Steve Jobs
You can hear Jobs talking about this at 3:52 of his Stanford commencement speech,right here:
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85-
“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay”
-Steve Jobs
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86-
“The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it”
-Steve Jobs
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87-
“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build”
-Steve Jobs
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88-
“I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. I think that a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing that and did exactly that.”
-Steve Jobs
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89-
“First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product – the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him talk about interface design right here (starts at 7:54)
https://youtu.be/9hUIxyE2Ns8?t=7m54s
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90-
“What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him deliver this line during the unveiling of the first iPhone over here at 04:28
https://youtu.be/9hUIxyE2Ns8?t=4m28s
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91-
“An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him deliver this quote right here (starts at 2:30)
https://youtu.be/9hUIxyE2Ns8?t=2m30s
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92-
“We want to reinvent the phone. What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It’s amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones”
-Steve Jobs
Watch him deliver this epic quote right here (starts at 22:46):
https://youtu.be/9hUIxyE2Ns8?t=22m46s
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93-
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them”
-Steve Jobs
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94-
“The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts”
-Steve Jobs
Quotes About Technology:
Jobs revolutionized the world of technology, but he focused on choosing the right team members and empowering consumers with his creations. It was never about tech, it was about people as the following quotes will illustrate…
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95-
“What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
-Steve Jobs
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96-
“The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment”
-Steve Jobs
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97-
“It takes these very simple-minded instructions – ‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’ – but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic”
-Steve Jobs
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98-
“This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?”
-Steve Jobs
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99-
“The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long”
-Steve Jobs
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100-
“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
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101-
“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore”
-Steve Jobs
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102-
“The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof”
-Steve Jobs
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103-
“I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent”
-Steve Jobs
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104-
“Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh”
-Steve Jobs
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105-
“I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den”
-Steve Jobs
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.106-
“I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do”
-Steve Jobs
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107-
“Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn”
-Steve Jobs
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108-
“Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near, if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form”
-Steve Jobs
Watch how Jobs shared this insight at 1:05:21 right here:
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109-
“Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor”
-Steve Jobs
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110-
“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
-Steve Jobs
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111-
“The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone”
-Steve Jobs
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112-
“We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact”
-Steve Jobs
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113-
“You’ll see more and more perfection of that – computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent”
-Steve Jobs
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114-
“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that”
-Steve Jobs
What’s your favorite Steve Jobs’ quote? Do you think he would have been a good president? Please share this article on Facebook so your friends also get inspired by this list of quotes. Thank you!