From Steve Jobs, on the plans for Apple’s new headquarters:
One of his lingering memories was of the orchards that had once dominated the area, so he hired a senior arborist from Stanford and decreed that 80% of the property would be landscaped in a natural manner, with six thousand trees. “I asked him to make sure to include a new set of apricot orchards,” Jobs recalled. “You used to see them everywhere, even on the corners, and they’re part of the legacy of this valley.”
More of this, please.
…the key difference between the Star and the Macintosh wasn’t design, but democratization. According to Wikipedia, a typical Star installation circa 1981 cost about $75,000 — it required a network and dedicated file server — and each additional workstation had a starting price of $16,000. The 1984 Macintosh cost $2,495 (and Jobs wanted it cheaper).
Bringing the concepts of a $100,000 networked workstation to a $2500 standalone mass market personal computer is, I say, radically innovative.
Little by little, people started breaking off and forming competitive companies, like those flowers or weeds that scatter seeds in hundreds of directions when you blow on them.
The Interview was all but complete when I met Jobs at a celebrity-filled birthday party for a youngster in New York City. As the evening progressed, I wandered around to discover that Jobs had gone off with the nine-year-old birthday boy to give him the gift he’d brought from California: a Macintosh computer. As I watched, he showed the boy how to sketch with the machine’s graphics program. Two other party guests wandered into the room and looked over Jobs’s shoulder. ‘Hmmm,’ said the first, Andy Warhol. ‘What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!’ The second guest, Keith Haring, the graffiti artist whose work now commands huge prices, went over. Warhol and Haring asked to take a turn at the Mac, and as I walked away, Warhol had just sat down to manipulate the mouse. ‘My God!’ he was saying, ‘I drew a circle!’
Maybe it’s better said that he changed people’s worlds rather than the world.
A few months before my sixth birthday, my parents brought home a Macintosh. It was 1984. One of my clearest early memories is sitting alone in the guest bedroom where we’d set up the computer, playing with MacPaint. It was magical. Computers have been a central part of my life ever since. I love them, and I feel very lucky that I get paid to help other people benefit from them. I’m grateful to Steve Jobs for making computers for people, even a five-year-old boy.
A lot of folks in tablet market are looking at this as the next PC, hardware and software done by different companies, and they’re talking about speeds and feeds, just as they did with PCs. Apple’s experience says that that’s not the right approach; these are post-PC devices that need to be more intuitive.
— Steve Jobs talking about the iPad 2 via Dan Moren
I agree that “a lot of folks” focus on the wrong things.
I'm Jed Sundwall. This is my blog, which you can follow on Tumblr or via RSS. You can talk to me on Twitter.
