Thread by @NeckarValue

The launch of the Mac made Steve Jobs a celebrity

In February 1985, he gave a long interview to Playboy Magazine - a few months before he was forced out of Apple

It's a tour de force touching on his philosophy, vision for Apple, and competition with IBM
reprints.longform.org/playboy-interv…

Amazingly, he had to make the case for why PCs were so important. Notice how he never resorts to lingo

"This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy"

Roughly right is better than precisely wrong

"You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good."

The internet - excuse me, the "nationwide communications network" - will be "as remarkable as the telephone"

Importance of user-friendliness

The telephone "performed basically the same function as the telegraph"
"But people already knew how to use it" and "it allowed you to sing"

Macintosh with "something called a mouse":
"Pointing is the metaphor we all know"

"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 nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there"
"Quality has to be carried all the way through"
"We didn’t build the Mac for anybody else."

Beginner's mind

"Our minds are electrochemical computers. You are really etching chemical patterns. People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record"

"There are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare."

Great companies

"Companies lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management"

"Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies."

Ironically this was right before his falling out with Sculley and the board

"eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of"

"Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future."

"Most of the time, we’re taking things.
Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool."

The "Fortune 14,000,000"
"We’re seeing five-page memos get compressed because we can use a picture to express the key concept.
There’s this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of a sudden have to become very dull and boring when they come to work. It’s simply not true."

"Computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world"

Frito Lay and the value of market share

"Nobody else can get 80% of the market, because they can’t get the sales and support staff. They can’t get it because they can’t afford it. They can’t afford it because they don’t have 80%. Catch-22. They don't have to innovate very much."

On Wozniak
"No one shared his interests, and he was a little ahead of his time. It was very lonely for him.
He’s driven from inner sights rather than external expectations of him, so he survived OK."

An Indian holy man fixes Jobs's haircut

"He was just rolling on the ground with laughter. Then he grabbed my arm and took me up this mountain trail.
He dunks my head in the water and pulls out a razor from his pocket and starts to shave my head"

"Death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete"

Sound familiar?
Listen to his Stanford commencement speech, 20 years later

"You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

It’s hard doing interviews and being visible: the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist"