If something is not good enough, stop doing it.
Its difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.
I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design.
The quest for simplicity has to pervade every part of the process. It really is fundamental.
Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.
One of the hallmarks of the team is this sense of looking to be wrong. It's the inquisitiveness, and sense of exploration. It's about being excited to be wrong, because then you've discovered something new.
The goal of Apple is not to make money but to make really nice products, really great products.
Objects and their manufacture are inseparable, you understand a product if you understand how it's made.
We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. Our success is a victory for purity, integrity - for giving a damn.
The more I learnt about this cheeky - almost rebellious - company, the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had reason for being that wasn't just about making money.
There's no other product that changes function like the computer.
There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.
So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.
As consumers we are incredibly discerning, we sense where has been great care in the design, and when there is cynicism and greed.
We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.
Really great design is hard. Good is the enemy of great. Competent design is not too much of a stretch. But if you are trying to do something new, you have challenges on so many axes.
We say no to a lot of things so we can invest an incredible amount of care on what we do.
If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it's new you are confronting problems and challenges you don't have references for.
The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.
When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.
I figured out some basic stuff: that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to.
It's just easier to talk about product attributes that you can measure with a number. Focus on price, screen size, that's easy. But there's a more difficult path, and that's to make better products, ones where maybe you can't measure their value empirically.
It's one of the curses of designing that when you look at anything, you're constantly thinking, Why? Why - why was it designed like that, and not like this?
With the early prototypes, I held the phone to my ear and my ear [would] dial the number. You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin colour and hairdo... that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn’t going to work.
One thing most people don't know is that Steve Jobs is an exceptional designer.
