Apple Company Quotes & Sayings

A logo doesn't need to say what a company does. Restaurant logos don't need to show food, dentist logos don't need to show teeth, furniture store logos don't need to show furniture. Just because it's relevant, doesn't mean you can't do better. The Mercedes logo isn't a car. The Virgin Atlantic logo isn't an airplane. The Apple logo isn't a computer. Etc. — David Airey

Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could - I'm searching for the right word - could, could die. — Steve Jobs

No other technology company other than Apple has successfully transitioned their platform. It's almost never done, and it's way harder than you realize. This transition is where tech companies go to die. — Jim Balsillie

The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn't have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want. — Steve Wozniak

So, your kids must love the iPad?" I asked Mr. [Steve] Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company's first tablet was just hitting the shelves. "They haven't used it," he told me. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
(Nytimes article, Sept. 10, 2014) — Nick Bilton

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much ... ) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers. — Eric Alterman

Steve wanted people to love Apple," says Cook, "not just work for Apple, but really love Apple, and really understand at a very deep level what Apple was about, about the values of the company. He didn't write them on the walls and make posters out of them anymore, but he wanted people to understand them. He wanted people to work for a greater cause. — Brent Schlender

People went to Dell for the computers, but they go to Apple for everything ... That's the difference between a transactional company and a transformational one. — Brian Chesky

So that's our approach. Very simple, and we're really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple." Apple's design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. — Walter Isaacson

Although I receive a small salary from Apple, I do virtually no real work at the company. — Steve Wozniak

Apple has a passion to deliver the most amazing, innovative - and, in fact, I got criticized because in "Win," there are at least 10 references to what Steve Jobs has done, and Apple's done, in that my editor said it's too much. But Apple is a passionate company. — Frank Luntz

Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. — George Packer

Nowadays sound embarrassing. Jobs wanted Apple "to become a wonderful consumer products company," Sculley wrote. "This was a lunatic plan ... Apple would never be a consumer products company ... We couldn't bend reality to all our dreams of changing the world ... High tech could not be designed and sold — Walter Isaacson

If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us. — James Surowiecki

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap. — Steve Jobs

When I left Apple, it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world - not just personal computers - and Apple was the number one selling computer. — John Sculley

The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn't as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people. — Andy Hertzfeld

I read the Steve Jobs book, and that kind of changed everything. I've been, like, an Apple geek my whole life and have always seen him as a hero. But reading the book, and learning about how he built the company, and maintaining that corporate culture and all that, I think that influenced me a lot. — G-Eazy

This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. — Walter Isaacson

Apple is the only company in the world that has all of that under one roof. We can invent a complete a solution that works - and take responsibility for it. — Steve Jobs

My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers. — Bre Pettis

Under [Tim] Cook, Apple has a new product line with the Apple Watch, but it hasn't generated the kind of excitement that the iPod, iPhone or iPad did. Still, Cook can't be called a failure. Under his leadership, the company released a larger version of the iPhone to record sales. — Laura Sydell

When you walk with trash, you end up smelling the same. — Anthony Liccione

Business was doing well, because all the locals knew that dishes made from the flowers that grew around the apple tree in the Waverley garden could affect the eater in curious ways. The biscuits with lilac jelly, the lavender tea cookies, and the tea cakes made with nasturtium mayonnaise the Ladies Aid ordered for their meetings once a month gave them the ability to keep secrets. The fried dandelion buds over marigold-petal rice, stuffed pumpkin blossoms, and rose-hip soup ensured that your company would notice only the beauty of your home and never the flaws. Anise hyssop honey butter on toast, angelica candy, and cupcakes with crystallized pansies made children thoughtful. Honeysuckle wine served on the Fourth of July gave you the ability to see in the dark. The nutty flavor of the dip made from hyacinth bulbs made you feel moody and think of the past, and the salads made with chicory and mint had you believing that something good was about to happen, whether it was true or not. — Sarah Addison Allen

Apple is this great American company that could have only happened here. — Tim Cook

The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient. — Steve Jobs

The NeXT purchase is too little too late. The Apple of the past was an innovative company that used software and hardware technology together to redefine the way people experienced computing. That Apple is already dead. Very adroit moves might be able to save the brand name. A company with the letters A-P-P-L-E in its name might survive, but it won't be the Apple of yore. — Nathan Myhrvold

I have never left the company. I keep a tiny residual salary to this day because that's where my loyalty should be forever. I want to be an "employee" on the company data base. I won't engineer, I'd rather be basically retired, due to my family. (talking about his relationship with Apple Inc) — Steve Wozniak

If Apple's a technology company in the music industry, why can't somebody in the music industry make technology? — Will.i.am

When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success. — Jay Samit

You may have an iPhone, for example, but its microchips are made by Apple's biggest competitor - the Korean electronics company Samsung. — Euny Hong

Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market. — Nick Harkaway

The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they're the most secretive. — Carol Bartz

Consider Steve Jobs. One biographer said, "Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead he was a genius." Jobs dropped out of college, went to find himself in India, and at one point was forced out of Apple, the company he co-founded, when sales were slow in 1985. Few would have predicted the level of his success by his death. "Think different" became the slogan of a multinational monolith that fused art and technology under his guidance. Jobs may have been average or unexceptional in many domains, but his vision and ability to think differently made him a genius. — Brian Hare

That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be. — Steve Jobs

The Apple iPad is not going to be the company's next runaway best seller. Not if the industry can help it ... with the iPad, Apple may have irked its somewhat new partner Intel Corp. Intel gets spanked by nobody. — John C. Dvorak

I'm not only a fan of Apple products, I have stock in the company. I think Steve Jobs has started one of the greatest corporations in the world. — Kid Rock

Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to talk about a phenomenon called a "bozo explosion," by which a company's mediocre early hires rise up through the ranks and end up running departments. The bozos now must hire other people, and of course they prefer to hire bozos. — Dan Lyons

The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize control, which made the company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between divisions that plagued decentralized companies. — Walter Isaacson

Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a company into the future. If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example — Walter Isaacson

With its imagination and large sales, Apple has become the world's most valuable IT company. However people are starting to have doubts regarding Apple's silence on heavy metal pollution problems. — Ma Jun

Pixar is the most technically advanced creative company; Apple is the most creatively advanced technical company. — Steve Jobs

Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company. — Jan Koum

Why does an iPhone cost only a couple hundred dollars? Because, as the stage performer Mike Daisey depicted in an arresting one-man show called 'The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,' Apple's shiniest products are made by a shadowy company in China called Foxconn. — Eric Liu

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business. — Naveen Jain

In Oklahoma, the CEO of the company that makes McDonald's apple pies told me that she had trouble finding enough Americans to handle modern factory jobs-during a recession. The days of rolling out dough and packing pies in a box were over. She needed people who could read, solve problems and communicate what had happened on their shift, and there weren't enough of them coming out of Oklahoma's high schools and community colleges. — Amanda Ripley

Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation. You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs'] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren't good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around. — Jonathan Ive

I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit. Now I'm a garbage can like everyone else. And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple. — Steve Jobs

I think Apple is a great device company. — Jeffrey Bewkes

Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone ... What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it's smart it will call the iPhone a 'reference design' and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures ... Otherwise I'd advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you'll see. — John C. Dvorak

People have asked me, 'Is it about Apple or is it about Jobs?' and I say it's about how a man becomes his company and the company becomes the man. That has only happened a few times, like it happened with Ford, I think, they became inextricably linked together. — Joshua Michael Stern

One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. " I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company," he recalled." The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When i got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that's why I decided to stay and rebuild it. — Walter Isaacson

I think what people love about the Steve Jobs story is not just the track record at Apple, but that comeback story, that he was thrown out of Apple, came back and built the company even greater. And that perseverance is so important in terms of entrepreneurship. And nobody is a better role model for that, for all entrepreneurs all over the world than Steve Jobs. — Steve Case

Apple Tree Inn, the nightly gathering place of all Winslow residents, and in many ways the core of the town's happiness, always had a warm fire crackling on the hearth and was known for its good cider and company. — Clara Diane Thompson

I asked Jeff Williams, the senior vice-president, if the Apple Watch seemed more purely Ive's than previous company products. After a silence of twenty-five seconds, during which Apple made fifty thousand dollars in profit, he said, "Yes. — Anonymous

We're not a media company. We don't own media. We don't own music. We don't own films or television. We're not a media company. We're just Apple. — Steve Jobs

Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not 'helping companies to grow' but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What — John Kay

If an Internet company steals content, they shut it down. And let me tell you, Apple France, Yahoo France or Google France, none of them have gone out of business. — Harvey Weinstein

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984. — Alan Kay

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple's iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt. — Mike Daisey

A track on iTunes costs next to zero to store on Apple's server, and next to zero to transmit to my computer. Whatever it cost the record company to produce (in terms of artist fees and marketing costs) it costs me 99p simply because it's unlawful to copy it for free. The — Paul Mason

I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. — Tim Cook

We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place; the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. — Steve Jobs

Even under Apple founder Steve Jobs, the company did emphasize values. Remember the Think Different ad campaign that used pictures of the Dalai Lama, Amelia Earhart, Mahatma Gandhi? But Jobs focused on the integrity of Apple's products. — Laura Sydell

Lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business. You've got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis. — Walter Isaacson

Apple has made this commitment that it's a green company. So how do you fulfill your commitment if you don't consider you have responsibility in your suppliers' pollution? — Ma Jun

No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it's Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world. — Al-Waleed Bin Talal

The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities. — Walter Isaacson

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership
leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status
Steve Jobs
recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets. — Damon Horowitz

Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained - 80% of the company - were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he'd made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the New York Times that the money did not mean much to him. "There's no yacht in my future," he said. "I've never done this for the money. — Walter Isaacson

The course of time, all of Apple's competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have ostensibly become commodities. As any company forced to compete on price, quality, service or features alone can attest, it is very hard to differentiate for any period of time or build loyalty on those factors alone. — Simon Sinek

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. — Steve Jobs

I was fortunate that I came out to the Valley in 1979, when I came out to go to Stanford Business School, and my very first assignment as a teaching assistant for an investments professor was to - he told me go down to this computer company in Cupertino called Apple. — Frank Quattrone

The PlayStation 4's errs not by being something other than what it is, but by holding on to the idea that its particular brand of novelty is in any way novel, by mistaking itself for figure rather than for ground. By calling itself "PlayStation 4" instead of just "PlayStation," because really all anyone wants is whatever PlayStation is made available, doing whatever things it ought to do at whatever moment it does them. Apple recognized this problem when it tried to correct the mistake of the "iPad 2" by reverting to its follow-up as just "the iPad," a name that still hasn't stuck. Leica, the old and traditional German photographic and optical equipment company, stopped numbering its digital M rangefinder cameras this year, after burning through as many numeric increments in six years as it had in the previous two decades. At some point, a camera is just a camera, no matter how nice it is. — Anonymous

Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts. — David Ignatius

It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing. — Tony Fadell

Look back to the old days: people bought an MS DOS machine and struggled with it for weeks to bring it up to speed. Then Apple created Macintosh, struggled a bit with it, but eventually succeeded. Then it went into other businesses. If your company truly wants to change the world, it would make these problems go away for customers. — Guy Kawasaki

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology. — Walter Isaacson

did you realize every time you speak a query into Apple's Siri artificial intelligence agent, your voice recording is analyzed and stored by the company for at least two years? — Marc Goodman

Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors "who looked like them, were in their sector and in their geography." Not anymore. Google started as a search engine and is now also becoming a car company and a home energy management system. Apple is a computer manufacturer that is now the biggest music seller and is also going into the car business, but in the meantime, with Apple Pay, it's also becoming a bank. Amazon, a retailer, came out of nowhere to steal a march on both IBM and HP in cloud computing. Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio. — Thomas L. Friedman

A country Sabbath is suggestive of rest and peace and quiet--sleepy blue skies, shadows golden and green, sunny fields, and the pink and snow of apple blossoms. June is at her height of radiant loveliness now. What a pity it is such a short time.

I am here in my old room--my little absolute kingdom. Here I read, write and dream. My favourite pictures adorn the walls, my well read books are on their shelves and my clock ticks me cheerful company. — L.M. Montgomery

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof. — Steve Jobs

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company's organizational chart from the design of its product. Can you figure out who reigns supreme at Apple when you open the box for your new iPhone? Yes. It's you, the customer; not the head of software, manufacturing, retail, hardware, apps, or the Guy Who Signs the Checks. That is exactly as it should be. — Eric Schmidt

The great thing about baking is that you can bring in an apple pie when you have company and say, 'I baked this for you,' and people love it. Men love it when you bake a pie for them. — Jerry Hall

If Apple has a flaw, it's the inability of the company to crush competition using the kind of aggressive tactics that companies like Microsoft and Intel have always applied. — John C. Dvorak

It's not about charisma and personality, it's about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry. — Steve Jobs

Apple is not sold with advertising despite the long series of clever advertisements produced for the company over the years. It is sold with evangelism, one person talking to another. The advertising reinforces the evangelist message. — Steve Hayden

Once, while talking to a group at a dinner party that included Larry Ellison, Amelio tried to put his company's problems in perspective for the other guests. "Apple is a boat," he said. "There's a hole in the boat, and it's taking on water. But there's also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions, so the boat is just standing still. My job is to get everyone rowing in the same direction." After Amelio walked away, Ellison turned to the person standing next to him and asked, "But what about the hole?" That was one story Steve never got tired of telling. — Brent Schlender