Inside Apple Quotes

“You either did or you didn't - there is no try. - Steve Jobs.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple -- From Steve Jobs Down to the Janitor: How America's Most Successful—and Most Secretive—Big Company Really Works

“I don't know anyone who wouldn't say it's the most fulfilling experience in their lives. People love it. Which is different from saying they have fun. Fun comes and goes. - Steve Jobs”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Saying no is a core tenet of Apple product development and, for that matter, Apple’s approach to doing business. In fact, the ability to say no—to reject features, products, categories, market segments, deals, and even certain partners—is how Steve Jobs explained Apple’s core strengths. “Focusing is powerful,” he said. “A start-up’s focus is very clear. Focus is not saying yes. It is saying no to really great ideas.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple doesn’t own the saw, and it doesn’t own the company that owns the saw. It also doesn’t staff the factory where the saw will be used. But it absolutely has an opinion as to which saw its supplier will use. It’s a new form of vertical integration. Where once a manufacturer would own every step of the process, Apple now controls each step without owning any of it.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that.” Jobs was speaking at a conceptual level. A former Apple engineer broke it down to the nitty-gritty: “Apple is all about integration. The way to get true integration is to control everything from the operating system down to what kind of saw you are going to use on the glass.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple's approach to career development is yet another way it runs contrary to the norms at other companies. The prevalent attitude for workers in the corporate world is to consider their growth trajectory. What's my path up? How do I get to the next level? Companies, in turn, spend an inordinate amount of time and money grooming their people for new responsibilities. They labor to find just the right place for people. But what if it turns out all that thinking is wrong? What if companies encouraged employees to be satisfied where they are because they're good at what they do, not to mention because that might be what's best for shareholders?

Instead of employees fretting that they were stuck in terminal jobs, what if they exalted in having found their perfect jobs? A certain amount of office politics might evaporate in a corporate culture where career growth is not considered tantamount to professional fulfilment. Shareholders, after all, don't care about fiefdoms and egos. There are many professionals who would find it liberating to work at what they are good at, receive competitive killer compensation, and not have to worry about supervising others or jockeying for higher rungs on an org chart.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple’s marketing and communications team works in a building just across from 1 Infinite Loop called M-3, the M standing for “Mariani Avenue”, not for marketing. When the marketers walk through the front door and then two consecutive secured doors, they walk around a light blue wall to get to their desks. On the wall is painted a prominent message in large whitish silver letters. It reads: SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY. A broad line is drawn through the first two SIMPLIFYs.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“aesthete”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works

“That kind of attention to detail means that as a result you really can’t do a lot of things. You have to just do a few things really, really well.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“He overtly thinks about the simplicity of Apple’s design and attention to detail. “We are primarily about building a really pure user experience that is heavily thought through,” said McCue.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Don’t talk about product until it’s done. Have high expectations”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Blankenship described Tesla’s version, an obvious homage to Apple marketing, regarding how to sell its $150,000-plus Roadster. “Zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds,” he said. “Well, that’s impossible. Nope. Get in the car and ride it and you’ll see, it’s zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds. Two hundred forty-five miles on a charge. That’s impossible. Nope, not in our cars. So what happens is you begin developing a customer who wants your car. It’s not about price, it’s about wanting the car.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Even if you have constrained resources, do not cut corners,” said Fadell, stating his number one rule from Apple. “People will feel it.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“I think as long as humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling into a world-view after a while, there will always be opportunity for young companies; young people to innovate, as it should be.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“large companies do not usually have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions … Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world, and that’s always been true,” he said in a 1995 interview for the Smithsonian Institution’s oral history project. “I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.” At the time of the interview Jobs was trying to build NeXT, a software company aiming to disrupt existing players.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“A few years later Jobs rhapsodized about Land in an interview with Playboy. “Land was a troublemaker,” Jobs said. “He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Jobs also took a direct interest in where the ads ran. He favored TV shows that fit the sensibility of Apple’s perceived customer. Modern Family, The Daily Show, and Family Guy were favorites. Smarter reality TV like The Amazing Race was preferred over the more mean-spirited Survivor. Jobs once flew off into a rage when an Apple spot accidentally found its way onto Glenn Beck’s program on the Fox News Channel. Jobs detested Fox News, but he generally didn’t want Apple to advertise on any political talking-head show.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple’s brand czar, Hiroki Asai, is a quiet executive almost completely unknown to the general public. He studied printed design at California Polytechnic State University, where Mary LaPorte, his graphic design professor, remembered him as a stickler for details and aesthetic integrity. “If he wanted a coffee cup stain on a poster, then he would make sure it was coffee, and not brown ink,” she recalled.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple may not do customer research to decide what products to make, but it absolutely pays attention to how customers use its products. So the marketing team working on the iMovie HD release scheduled for Macworld, on January 11, 2005, decided to shoot a wedding. The ceremony it filmed was gorgeous: a sophisticated, candlelit affair at the Officers’ Club of San Francisco’s Presidio. The bride was an Apple employee, and the wedding was real. There was one problem with the footage, however. Steve Jobs didn’t like it. He watched it the week before Christmas, recalled Alessandra Ghini, the marketing executive managing the launch of iLife. Jobs declared that the San Francisco wedding didn’t capture the right atmosphere to demonstrate what amateurs could do with iMovie. “He told us he wanted a wedding on the beach, in Hawaii, or some tropical location,” said Ghini. “We had a few weeks to find a wedding on a beach and to get it shot, edited, and approved by Steve. The tight time frame allowed for no margin for error.” With time short and money effectively no object, the team went into action. It contacted Los Angeles talent agencies as well as hotels in Hawaii to learn if they knew of any weddings planned—preferably featuring an attractive bride and groom—over the New Year’s holiday. They hit pay dirt in Hollywood: A gorgeous agency client and her attractive fiancé were in fact planning to wed on Maui during the holiday. Apple offered to pay for the bride’s flowers, to film the wedding, and to provide the couple with a video. In return, Apple wanted rights for up to a minute’s worth of footage of its choosing.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“From Apple’s iconic “Think Different” campaign in 1997 featuring images of Gandhi and Einstein and Bob Dylan (and no Apple products) to its later silhouetted hipsters grooving to music on their iPods (with the ubiquitous white earbuds connected to white cords streaking down their lithe bodies), Apple has excelled at selling a lifestyle.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Apple storytelling initially is high concept, telling customers not what they want to buy but what kind of people they want to be. This is classic “lifestyle” advertising, the selling of an image associated with a brand rather than the product itself.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The goal of the Apple stores was to appeal to non-Macintosh customers,”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“If you went back to the year 2000 and you looked at Apple, most people knew one thing about Apple products: They didn’t want one,” he said. “And so what ended up happening was an education process. We needed to get in front of as many people as possible. So they’re walking by, and eventually one day they walk in. And then we get a chance to tell the story and we tell that story in a way that is respectful, helpful, friendly, and not pushy. It’s not about price. It’s about product.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“George Blankenship, a top executive of Apple’s retail initiative when it began, explained the very real link between storytelling and driving demand.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“You’re going to do twenty briefings, and they’ll all sound exactly the same to you. But that’s what you want, because the person who is hearing it is hearing it for the first time. And where you get into trouble is where you start to mix it up because you’re getting bored. So one of the key things was: Just use the same words over and over and over again. That will turn into the same words that the consumer hears, which ultimately will turn into the same words that they then use to define the product to their friends.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“Consistency of message helps build customer loyalty. Clear messaging can also have a huge impact on the bottom line. “If there’s one thing that I take away today, and I still use time and time again, it’s that the best messaging is clear, concise, and repeated,” reflected Borchers, who became a venture capitalist with the Silicon Valley firm Opus Capital after leaving Apple.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The key, said Borchers, was highlighting exactly what made the iPhone stand out”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The trick with selling breakthrough products is to explain them clearly.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple

“The hallmarks of the Apple product message are, as with so much at Apple, simplicity and clarity. Throughout its history, Apple has unveiled products and features that either didn’t previously exist in the industry or represented meaningful leaps forward. The simple design and capabilities of the first iPod and the groundbreaking multitouch expand-and-contract feature on the iPhone are two noteworthy examples.”
― Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple