INC.: Give us an example.
JOBS: I have a friend at Stanford, a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. He was showing me what some of his students were doing to understand how proteins fold. He asked, "Couldn't you model this stuff on a computer if you had something more powerful than a PC?" It really got me thinking. What if you came up with something that was as easy to use as a Mac, or even easier, and had the power of a workstation? What if you unleashed that machine in higher education? The more I thought about it, the more excited I got.
INC.: But there are a lot of workstations around and computers far more powerful than workstations. What's so exciting about a souped-up microcomputer?
JOBS: Well, that gets back to something I've said before. You see, I think humans are basically tool builders, and the computer is the most remarkable tool we've ever built. The big insight a lot of us had in the 1970s had to do with the importance of putting that tool in the hands of individuals. Let's say that—for the same amount of money it takes to build the most powerful computer in the world—you could make 1,000 computers with one-thousandth the power and put them in the hands of 1,000 creative people. You'll get more out of doing that than out of having one person use the most powerful computer in the world. Because people are inherently creative. They will use tools in ways the toolmakers never thought possible. And once a person figures out how to do something with that tool, he or she can share it with the other 999.
INC.: That's a big idea.
JOBS: It's an extremely powerful paradigm. It's what has driven a bunch of us since this whole thing began to happen, and it hasn't changed. It hasn't changed for me since 1975. That's almost 15 years now. I believe this is one of the most important things that's going to happen in our generation. It would be easy to step back and say, "Well, it's pretty much over now." But if you look carefully, it's not over by any stretch of the imagination. The technological advances are coming at a rate that is far more ferocious than ever. To me, it's staggering to contemplate the tools we're going to be able to put in people's hands in the next few years—and I don't get impressed by this stuff so easily anymore.
So what we're doing here is driven by a fairly strong faith that people are going to continue to be as creative and as ingenious and as sharing with their results as they have been over the past 15 years. That sharing gives us a kind of leverage. For every improvement we can make in the tools we give people, we can improve the ultimate results even more, thanks to this leverage. That's what gets us so excited.
INC.: Let's go back to the process of creating these tools. How different was it back in the '70s, when you and Steve Wozniak were developing the Apple I and the Apple II?
JOBS: It was basically the same, although we were a lot less sophisticated. The customers for the Apple I were Woz and me and our friends in the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was really the first computer to address the needs of the hobbyist who wanted to play with software but could not build his or her own hardware. It came with a digital circuit board, but you still had to go get your own keyboard, power supply, and television monitor. If you were a techie, the Apple I seemed to go 90 percent of the way. Of course, if you weren't a techie, it only went 10 percent of the way. We sold almost 200 of the Apple I. I think they're all collector's items now.
INC.: No doubt.
JOBS: The Apple I took us over a big hurdle, but a lot of people who wanted to use the product were unable to. We were getting some feedback from a fairly small sample—maybe 40, 50 people. We were hearing from dealers, too. They'd say, "I think I can sell 10 times more of these if you would just put a case and keyboard around it." That's where a lot of the direction for the Apple II came from. If there hadn't been an Apple I, there would not have been an Apple II. The first product solved some of the problems and exposed the remaining ones in a much clearer light. But we were going on common sense. We didn't think in terms of customer feedback. We never even used the word customer.
INC.: So what were you thinking?
JOBS: We were thinking we should build a computer you could just roll out of the box and use. There were a lot more software hobbyists than hardware hobbyists around, and we could satisfy a lot more people if they didn't have to be hardware hackers to use it.
INC.: And that observation led to the Apple II.
JOBS: Right. And the same fundamental thing happened in 1979, when I saw an Alto [that had been developed] at Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center]. It was as if, all of a sudden, the veil had been lifted from my eyes. It had the mouse and the multiple-font text on the screen, and you realized in an instant that this would appeal to exponentially more people than the Apple II. I'm talking about people who didn't want to learn how to use a computer—they just wanted to use one. You could eliminate a whole layer of what someone had to know in order to take advantage of this tool.
INC.: So the contribution of the Apple II . . .
JOBS: The Apple II peeled off the hardware layer. You didn't need to know about the hardware to use a computer. The next step was the transition from the Apple II to the Macintosh, which peeled off the computer-literacy layer, if you will. In other words, you didn't have to be a hacker or a computer scientist to use one of these.
INC.: Let's talk about some other aspects of these products. We've read stories about how finicky you were with the Apple II—how you insisted that every line of solder on the circuit board be perfectly straight, for example, and that the inside of the machine look neat and attractive.
JOBS: Yeah, that's right.
INC.: The NeXT circuit board is a thing of beauty, too. So is the computer. In fact, it could probably go in some collection at the Museum of Modern Art.
