My fingers hovered over the smooth keys of my paper-thin MacBook Air as I read the first notice of Steve Jobs’s death Wednesday evening. A second later, my iPhone and iPad lit up like fireflies. As I sat there, staring at the three shiny screens in front of me, my heart instantly ached over the passing of a man I had never met, but I felt knew me.
Many people communicate last wishes about their funerals, but perhaps no person in history has ever shaped the actual death announcement so definitively. Synced across our electronic devices, the moment was beautifully curated, as if Jobs had been designing it, even unintentionally, for years.
To Jobs, design was never for its own sake, and instead a means to something greater – the shaping of experiences. Aside from the innumerable accolades of Apple’s brilliant CEO as an innovator, a business hero, a visionary, he was also like you and me: a user, a consumer. And from that vantage point, he tuned in to our everyday experiences, helping us orchestrate our complicated lives.
There is no question that Jobs’s aesthetic innovations will be among his most enduring legacies, but the appearance of Apple products was actually the least of Jobs’s concerns. “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “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.”
Among countless other companies, fierce competitors like Blackberry, Dell, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung have attempted to adopt Jobs’s gleaming white, “less is more” approach. They dutifully streamlined and simplified wherever possible, though never with the same degree of success. For Jobs understood that the most worthwhile kind of simplicity wasn’t the product of simple thinking, but the result of acute observation, audacious demands, and a commitment to excellence at every turn. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
Jobs reached for the “simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Our modern lives – filled with a cacophony of demands, relationships, and news, made pleasurable by music, the capacity to create and communicate – are inherently complicated. Jobs understood that, in turn, we needed tools that didn’t mirror our increasingly complicated lives, but just the opposite – tools that oriented us, accompanied us, made our lives less heavy to heave around. Within his little black and white boxes we found that our days, our networks, our ideas, were more containable, and at the same time, ever expanding. Industrial designer Yves Béhar captures Jobs well: “He has given a large portion of the population a way to engage in our daily digital culture,” Mr. Béhar wrote yesterday in Forbes. “Thanks to his tools, we are all a part of an ever-growing creative class.”
Jobs democratized design and technology – previously viewed as costly luxuries – across cultures and generations. I can’t help but think of my mom, a nurse and mother of six from Milwaukee, Wis. Not a day passes without a typed missive, photo, or video captured on and sent from her iPhone to one of us kin, no matter where we are in the world. Apple products have made her feel more connected and more alive than ever – an artist, a jokester, photographer, videographer.
It’s done much of the same for my two year-old niece, who has her own, precarious way of holding her mom’s iPhone with her pudgy little fingers. She lights up, captivated every time the iPhone comes to life. Jobs was the master of that moment, which he built into a world stage of Apple’s product unveilings. “He always talks about how wonderous it will be to use something, to actually live with it, and hold it in your hands,” wrote Fast Company’s Cliff Kuang at the time of Jobs’s resignation in August. “If you listen to Steve Jobs’s presentations over the years, he comes across not as the creator of a product so much as its very first fan – the first person to digest its possibilities.”
The architect of gorgeous gadgets and intuitive interfaces, Jobs was even more so an anthropologist of the good life. He wanted his designs to transform lives – how we work, how we learn, how we love, travel, create, communicate, and live. He believed they could. Ironically, the success of his mission was never so obvious as that fateful moment that his death reverberated across his network of life-altering inventions, and into our hearts.
Many people communicate last wishes about their funerals, but perhaps no person in history has ever shaped the actual death announcement so definitively. Synced across our electronic devices, the moment was beautifully curated, as if Jobs had been designing it, even unintentionally, for years.
To Jobs, design was never for its own sake, and instead a means to something greater – the shaping of experiences. Aside from the innumerable accolades of Apple’s brilliant CEO as an innovator, a business hero, a visionary, he was also like you and me: a user, a consumer. And from that vantage point, he tuned in to our everyday experiences, helping us orchestrate our complicated lives.
There is no question that Jobs’s aesthetic innovations will be among his most enduring legacies, but the appearance of Apple products was actually the least of Jobs’s concerns. “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “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.”
Among countless other companies, fierce competitors like Blackberry, Dell, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung have attempted to adopt Jobs’s gleaming white, “less is more” approach. They dutifully streamlined and simplified wherever possible, though never with the same degree of success. For Jobs understood that the most worthwhile kind of simplicity wasn’t the product of simple thinking, but the result of acute observation, audacious demands, and a commitment to excellence at every turn. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
Jobs reached for the “simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Our modern lives – filled with a cacophony of demands, relationships, and news, made pleasurable by music, the capacity to create and communicate – are inherently complicated. Jobs understood that, in turn, we needed tools that didn’t mirror our increasingly complicated lives, but just the opposite – tools that oriented us, accompanied us, made our lives less heavy to heave around. Within his little black and white boxes we found that our days, our networks, our ideas, were more containable, and at the same time, ever expanding. Industrial designer Yves Béhar captures Jobs well: “He has given a large portion of the population a way to engage in our daily digital culture,” Mr. Béhar wrote yesterday in Forbes. “Thanks to his tools, we are all a part of an ever-growing creative class.”
Jobs democratized design and technology – previously viewed as costly luxuries – across cultures and generations. I can’t help but think of my mom, a nurse and mother of six from Milwaukee, Wis. Not a day passes without a typed missive, photo, or video captured on and sent from her iPhone to one of us kin, no matter where we are in the world. Apple products have made her feel more connected and more alive than ever – an artist, a jokester, photographer, videographer.
It’s done much of the same for my two year-old niece, who has her own, precarious way of holding her mom’s iPhone with her pudgy little fingers. She lights up, captivated every time the iPhone comes to life. Jobs was the master of that moment, which he built into a world stage of Apple’s product unveilings. “He always talks about how wonderous it will be to use something, to actually live with it, and hold it in your hands,” wrote Fast Company’s Cliff Kuang at the time of Jobs’s resignation in August. “If you listen to Steve Jobs’s presentations over the years, he comes across not as the creator of a product so much as its very first fan – the first person to digest its possibilities.”
The architect of gorgeous gadgets and intuitive interfaces, Jobs was even more so an anthropologist of the good life. He wanted his designs to transform lives – how we work, how we learn, how we love, travel, create, communicate, and live. He believed they could. Ironically, the success of his mission was never so obvious as that fateful moment that his death reverberated across his network of life-altering inventions, and into our hearts.
Steve Jobs quotes: The tech titan on work, tech, & creativity
A catalog of Steve Jobs quotes, organized by topic
Matthew Shaer
On Wednesday evening, Apple announced the death of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. As Brad Knickerbocker of the Monitor has noted, Jobs was something of an oracle – a man who "seemed to know what people wanted and thought they needed even before they did." Jobs was also an inveterate showman, and a reliable dispenser of particularly good quotes. What follows are a few of the very best, organized by topic.
On the evolution of technology
"To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing – and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it," Jobs told Rolling Stone in 1994. "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."
On creativity...
"Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs said in a Wired interview in 1996. "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. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity."
...and more specifically, on creating an interesting machine
"Ultimately it comes down to taste," Jobs explained in the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
On Apple
"Apple was this incredible journey," Jobs said during an interview with the Smithsonian Institute. "I mean we did some amazing things there. The thing that bound us together at Apple was the abilit y to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important. We were all pretty young. The average age in the company was mid-to-late twenties. Hardly anybody had families at the beginning and we all worked like maniacs and the greatest joy was that we felt we were fashioning collective works of art much like twentieth century physics. Something important that would last, that people contributed to and then could give to more people; the amplification factor was very large."
On work
"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," Jobs said during a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. "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. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle."
On the future
In the same address, Jobs exhorted the 2005 graduates to seize control of their potential. "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," he said. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Steve Jobs on Steve Jobs
"I'm a tool builder," Jobs said in the Rolling Stone interview. "That's how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is... you can't really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we're going. And that's about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own."
Matthew Shaer
On Wednesday evening, Apple announced the death of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. As Brad Knickerbocker of the Monitor has noted, Jobs was something of an oracle – a man who "seemed to know what people wanted and thought they needed even before they did." Jobs was also an inveterate showman, and a reliable dispenser of particularly good quotes. What follows are a few of the very best, organized by topic.
On the evolution of technology
"To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing – and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it," Jobs told Rolling Stone in 1994. "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."
On creativity...
"Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs said in a Wired interview in 1996. "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. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity."
...and more specifically, on creating an interesting machine
"Ultimately it comes down to taste," Jobs explained in the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
On Apple
"Apple was this incredible journey," Jobs said during an interview with the Smithsonian Institute. "I mean we did some amazing things there. The thing that bound us together at Apple was the abilit y to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important. We were all pretty young. The average age in the company was mid-to-late twenties. Hardly anybody had families at the beginning and we all worked like maniacs and the greatest joy was that we felt we were fashioning collective works of art much like twentieth century physics. Something important that would last, that people contributed to and then could give to more people; the amplification factor was very large."
On work
"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," Jobs said during a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. "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. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle."
On the future
In the same address, Jobs exhorted the 2005 graduates to seize control of their potential. "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," he said. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Steve Jobs on Steve Jobs
"I'm a tool builder," Jobs said in the Rolling Stone interview. "That's how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is... you can't really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we're going. And that's about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own."
