“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.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

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. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.

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. 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.

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 ever 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.

I had always dreamed of working at Apple someday, and, eventually, I did.

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For part of my time there, I had an office that received no visible sunlight and had no view of the outside. It wasn’t all bad, I was enjoying my work enough, but I’d go out of my way to try to enjoy the sunshine whenever I had it.

One day, I was working late and left my office to get dinner at the cafeteria. When I stepped outside, I realized it had been the first time I had seen the sun all day, as it had been foggy that morning, and I had skipped lunch.

I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.

And a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they’re looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies. And they’re talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs.

And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.

And we think we’re on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in the organization to build these kinds of products.

And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in this market. And I hope that what you’ve seen today gives you a good feel for that.

Man, this guy just gets it. And with HP pulling out of PCs and tablets it seems that perhaps nobody else does.

I find it hilarious that the best selling PCs now look like Macs, and Microsoft just announced that Windows 8 is going to have an “App Store”.

It cannot possibly be more obvious that Apple is the only one innovating in the PC space, and that everyone else is just following.

The Loop is reporting on a study released Wednesday by the Yankee Group that indicates that 40% of potential smartphone buyers in Europe said that they would go for an iPhone.

The study was a poll of 5,000 consumers and 2,250 IT decision-makers working at companies across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

The study indicated that Android devices came in a distant second at 19% and BlackBerry and Nokia followed at 17% and 15% respectively.

I’ve seen articles stating there’s similar domination of Android in South Korea. So what can we draw from that? Marketing? Cultural values?

And will the Windows phone gather velocity in South Korea since that country is so Windows-centric?