First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we're going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product - the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.
Interpretation
Innovative interfaces drive the development of groundbreaking products.
In this quote, Steve Jobs highlights the progression of technological interfaces, starting from the mouse to the click wheel, and now to multi-touch technology. He emphasizes how each new interface has been pivotal in creating revolutionary products that have changed the way we interact with technology, such as the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone.
In practice
In a technology conference to highlight the impact of user interface innovations.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.
The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.
We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
What we did with this mobile telephone was create a revolution. Before the mobile phone existed we were calling a place, now we are calling a person.
People who say they don't see the acceleration of innovation is a wilful blindness. We are innovation at a wonderful speed for the basic things we think everyone should get.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
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