I want to laugh at how old-fashioned and easily entertained I must sound to a kid today, who has a lot more seductive electronic shit competing for their attention. But a story is a story, in any era. And the best ones, I’ve always thought, develop from mysteries you want to solve.
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.
All the genius I have lies in this – when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labour and thought.
When any new form comes into the foreground of things, we naturally look at it through the old stereos. We can’t help that. This is normal…We’re just trying to fit the old things into the new form, instead of asking what is the new form going to do to all the assumptions we had before.
In our opinion, the two approaches – growth and value – are joined at the hip. Growth is always a component in the calculation of value, constituting a variable whose importance can range from negligible to enormous and whose impact can be negative as well as positive.
The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases. With technology, simplifications at the level of usage invariably result in added complexity of the underlying mechanism.