When we’re designing a product, we have to look to different attributes of the product. Some of those attributes will be the materials that it’s made from and the form that’s connected to those materials. So for example, with the first iMac that we made, the primary component of that was the cathode ray tube, which was spherical. We would have an entirely different approach to designing something like that than the current iMac, which is a very thin, flat-panel display. […]

A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like [the iPhone] is actually getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they’re not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable. It feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like, well, of course it’s that way. You know, why wouldn’t it be any other way?

“Apple Computer, Inc. ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II, and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is now recommitted to its original mission-to bring the best personal computing products and support to students, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, businesspersons and consumers in over 140 countries around the world.”

Not only did he know and love product engineering, it's all he really wanted to do. He told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn't allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it. As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and collaborated with us. He was basically the Product Manager for all of the products I worked on, even though there eventually were other people with that title, who usually weren't allowed in the room :)

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

He built his own version of the user interface framework, the software that sits right above the graphics processor on an iOS device. Apple creates that for developers — it was completely unnecessary for him to do this. But this is the kind of thing he considers “fun.”

“It’s insane,” he admitted. “But I wanted to experiment with different ways of driving graphics … Apple’s [UIKit] is the best, but I wanted to try.” The experiment was a resounding success — and now has a million guinea pigs testing his code via Letterpress. And, he said, “there have been zero issues” with what he built.

Everything needs to line up, he said. He uses the analogy of walking through a forest and you suddenly glimpse that view where all the trees happen to align perfectly and you can glimpse an unobstructed opening. That’s how he knows when to pursue a project.

Cook: Two things. One, I wouldn’t call it a process. Creativity is not a process, right? It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. They keep thinking about something until they find the best way to do it. It’s caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn’t been thought of before. It’s providing an environment where that feeds off each other and grows.
So just to be clear, I wouldn’t call that a process. Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we’re very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn’t one of those. A lot of companies have innovation departments, and this is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation or something. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door. (Laughs.)

...

Cook: It’s critical. It’s extremely critical. The most important things in life, whether they’re personal or professional, are decided on intuition. I think you can have a lot of information and data feeding that intuition. You can do a lot of analysis. You can do lots of things that are quantitative in nature. But at the end of it, the things that are most important are always gut calls. And I think that’s just not true for me, but for many, many people. I don’t think it’s unique.

Now the affable executive, a 48-year-old Miami native of Cuban descent, has become a prime architect of Apple's software strategy and one of the most important product voices at a company where no clear chief product visionary has emerged since Mr. Jobs's death last year.

Siri stands as a monumental opportunity both for Apple as a transactional money machine and for its users as a new paradigm of discovery and task completion more approachable than any we’ve seen to date. In the end, Siri is Apple’s game to lose.

Like industrial design of physical devices, software is part form and part function: aesthetics and experience. Apple’s software problems aren’t dark linen, Corinthian leather or torn paper. In fact, Apple’s software problems aren’t much about aesthetics at all…they are mostly about experience. To paraphrase Ive’s former boss, Apple’s software problems aren’t about how they look, but how they work. Sometimes — sadly more often than we expect — they don’t:

All that leaves Cue, master negotiator and product resuscitator, in a more important role than ever inside Apple. In interviews with 10 executives from the music, sports, TV and film industries, Cue is described as someone who impressed counterparts at the entertainment companies by spending significant amounts of time learning their businesses. Cue tried, if he could, to help friendly execs from the other side of the bargaining table to meet their business goals and look good in the eyes of their bosses. He sent gifts. He was quick to return calls. To many execs past and present at the major labels and Hollywood studios, Cue became a friend.

Apple, famously, has the same pricing philosophy as Louis Vuitton: it sells premium products at premium prices, and it never discounts. That philosophy has made it an aspirational brand worldwide: you don’t see vendors in China selling fake Google Nexus 7s. Sometimes, as with the iPhone and iPad, the world beats a path to the company’s door in any case. Other times, as in the case of wireless routers or external displays, Apple’s products are so much more expensive than the competition that only the rich Apple faithful tend to buy them. But that uncompromising devotion to the fundamental philosophy is what has made Apple such a powerful global brand.

"Where we Mac nerds go wrong is in mistaking traditions for strengths. Loss aversion is alive and well in the Mac community; with each "feature" removed and each decision point eliminated from our favorite OS, our tendency is to focus heavily on what's been lost, sometimes blinding ourselves to the gains."

"How long can they keep it up? I don’t know, but I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past."

"Beliefs and actions are like two separate musical tones, each with its own pitch, each repeating at a certain wavelength. Integrity is when the two come together, when beliefs and actions are in total alignment. A certain cosmic vibration occurs — there is resonance."

"I'd argue that Apple's push toward devices that are more about the human interface and less about the components is a form of a categorical imperative, a rule for acting that has no conditions or qualifications — that there is no line, there is only an endless drive towards progress: more portable devices that get the job done with less thinking about the hardware."

"Schiller has become the fiercest defender of Apple’s brand. When product specs leak, Schiller is the one pushing for investigations to find the culprit, say two former Apple managers. He helped craft Apple’s bluntly worded guidelines for app developers, which state that “if your app looks like it was cobbled together in a few days … please brace yourself for rejection.” When Instagram launched an Android version of its initially iPhone-only app, Schiller stopped using it."

"In these onstage conversations, Jobs explained his — and Apple’s — evolving philosophy of where the digital world was heading, and of business itself. He discussed competitors, controversies and his own sense of what matters most. He stressed the importance of building products for their actual users, not “orifices” like corporate IT departments or cellphone carriers. He explained why it was often more important to decide what products and features not to build than to pick the ones that were built. He even appeared jointly in a historic conversation with his lifelong rival, Bill Gates."

"Even as he tweaks the Apple operating manual, Cook goes to great pains to pledge allegiance to the corporate culture Steve Jobs created. Asked at the Goldman investor forum how his leadership might change Apple and what of its culture he intended to maintain, Cook ignored the first part of the question and focused only on the latter. "Steve grilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great products and that we should stay extremely focused on few things rather than try to do so many that we did nothing well." He called Apple a "magical place" where employees could do "their life's best work."

"“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense,” he explains. “Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products.
“I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.”

"Jobs may have been impulsive at times, but he was always methodical. This kind of nature suited an autodidact with eclectic tastes, empowering him either to obsess impatiently about a pressing problem that had to be dealt with immediately--much like an engineer--or else to let an idea steep and incubate until he got it right. This is why Jobs was so often right on the big picture, even when he got the details wrong."

"In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism."

If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Steve Jobs smelled so foul that none of his co-workers at Atari in the seventies would work with him. Entreating him to shower was usually futile; he’d inevitably claim that his strict vegan diet had rid him of body odor, thus absolving him of the need for standard hygiene habits. Later, friends would theorize that he had been exercising what would prove a limitless capacity for sustained and gratuitous lying that came to be nicknamed the “reality distortion field.”

In this special edition of the Macworld Podcast, recorded on the Macworld | iWorld show floor, I'm joined by a pair of Mac luminaries—Daring Fireball's John Gruber and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Andy Ihnatko. Our topic: The State of Apple.