Quotes & Sayings About Macintosh

Internet services at Apple, Jobs's wingman in dealing with content companies. ANDREA "ANDY" CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna's firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs. LARRY ELLISON. CEO of Oracle and personal friend of Jobs. — Walter Isaacson

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood. — Steven Sinofsky

One of the talents of the [late] great Steve Jobs is that he [knew] how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have has a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason. (p.98) — Seth Godin

I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that. — Jeff Dunham

And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople get ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report. — Dave Barry

It is a joke to me that this man should have presented himself as an ardent conservationist, since so many of the companies he served as a director or in which he was a major stockholder were notorious damagers of the water or the soil or the atmosphere. But it wasn't a joke to *MacIntosh, who had come into this world incapable of caring much about anything. So, in order to hide this deficiency, he had become a great actor, pretending even to himself that he cared passionately about all sorts of things. With — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it. — Jeff Vespa

As for the Sun mouse, I'm not a big multi-button mouse fan, because I just can't remember which button to push when. I rather like the Macintosh system of using four modifier keys with the mouse. — Bruce Tognazzini

He's back in Maine now.She did say he badgered her with questions. Of course, she didn't have the answer until she spoke to me and found out you were here." Gennie frowned at the sea and said nothing. "She wondered if you were following Macintosh in the papers. It took me over two hours to figure why she would have asked that.
Gennie turned back with a speculative look which Serena met blandly. "Perhaps I'm not following you," she said, automatically guarding Grant's secret.
Serena took the pot the waiter placed on the table. "Coffee,Veronica?"
Gennie let out an admiring laugh and nodded her head. "You're very quick, Rena."
"I love puzzles," she corrected, "and the pieces were all there. — Nora Roberts

My perspective is this: my allegiance is to the best product for my needs. For a computer, this means Macintosh. For phone and tablet, this means Android. — Guy Kawasaki

Ross Perot came and visited Apple several times and visited the Macintosh factory. Ross was a systems thinker. — John Sculley

What we're doing here will send a giant ripple through the universe. — Steve Jobs

I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the methodical path of the Jesuits ... It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that all can reach salvation. — Umberto Eco

I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh. — David Foster Wallace

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves. Marguerite Young has added epic grandeur to the philosophical novel. Every page gleams with the poetry of existence. — Nona Balakian

There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. Then is when they forget to keep a sharp lookout for sharks and whales. This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed. So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned. — Kurt Vonnegut

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984. — Kevin Mitnick

The two most important things about people on a revolutionary team are their ability and passion. Their educational level or work experience is meaningless
most of the engineers who did ground-breaking work of the Macintosh design didn't even graduate from college. — Guy Kawasaki

There was no CD tray, just a subtle slot. And as with the original Macintosh, there was no — Walter Isaacson

Jobs liked to tell the story- and he did so to his team that day- about how everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect. He talked about doing it on Toy Story, when the character of Woody had evolved into being a jerk, and on a couple of occasions with the original Macintosh. " If something isn't right, you can't just ignore it and say you'll fix it later," he said. " That's what other companies do. — Walter Isaacson

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone? — Walter Isaacson

My first Macintosh was a 128k machine which I upgraded to 512k the minute it became possible. — Buffy Sainte-Marie

With a curse, Vishous took after the three free-thinkers, dematerializing out in front of where the trio seemed to be heading. As he re-formed, he knew they were fucking humans even before he saw that the one in the rear was running backward with what was no doubt a cocksucking Apple, iConformist POS front and center and on video record. He fricking iHated anything with a goddamn Macintosh trademark. V jumped out into the guy's path, which of course J. J. Abrams didn't notice, because, hello, he was too busy getting footage. — J.R. Ward

By the year 2020 or 2030, all this will finally culminate in personalized DNA codes. Gilbert claims, You'll be able to go to a drugstore and get your own DNA sequence on a CD, which you can then analyze at home on your Macintosh. — Michio Kaku

I think the Macintosh proves that everyone can have a bitmapped display. — Bill Joy

It feels as if ever since the iPhone was released, the Macintosh computer has become just another leverage point in this other operating system's marketing plan. — Douglas Rushkoff

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. — Steve Jobs

We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don't know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer's system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back. BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa. — Walter Isaacson

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. — James Joyce

The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had - and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it. — Steve Jobs

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC. — Bill Gates

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

Isaacson's biography can be read in several ways. It is on the one hand a history of the most exciting time in the age of computers, when the machines first became personal and later, fashionable accessories. It is also a textbook study of the rise and fall and rise of Apple and the brutal clashes that destroyed friendships and careers. And it is a gadget lover's dream, with fabulous, inside accounts of how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad came into being. But more than anything, Isaacson has crafted a biography of a complicated, peculiar personality - Jobs was charming, loathsome, lovable, obsessive, maddening - and the author shows how Jobs's character was instrumental in shaping some of the greatest technological innovations — Walter Isaacson

I pat the brand new twenty-seven inch Macintosh computers Mr. Foley brought us. 'These boxes alone should make both of us scream like it's Christmas morning! Snap out of it. Santa came! Now we get to play with all of our toys! — Anne Eliot

As Apple continues to release new styles of netbooks, laptops, and even desktops with untold movie-watching and game-playing capabilities, I wouldn't be surprised to see the iPhone operating system running on them - and the Macintosh eventually becoming a thing of the past. — Douglas Rushkoff

Oh my God, look!"
I stand and hold out my hand for Sam to inspect.
"Wow," he says, taking the glass and holding it up to the sun. "Red is, like, the rarest color there is.
You're totally lucky you even saw it."
I take the deep red, half-dollar-sized piece from him and smile, looking out across the ocean. I told Matt in my letter before we left that I'd find a piece just for him, but now that it's actually here, sparkling in my hand, I know he'd want me to do something else with it.
I raise it above my head and throw it as hard and as far as I can into the sea.
Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna.
Sam laughs. "Hey, crazy, what'd you do that for? You'll probably never see something like that again in your entire life."
"Right. But I did see it. And now someone else can, too. — Sarah Ockler

I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so, if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android. — Fred Wilson

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. — Gary Wolf

Steve Jobs told the Macintosh team that real artists ship. — Eric Schmidt

The boards had to be beautiful in Steve [Jobs]'s eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box, because he didn't want people tampering with anything. — John Sculley

I taught myself computer. Then Macintosh came along, and it became a really bad addiction. If I wasn't in show business, I'd have pocket protectors growing out of my chest. I do everything on it. It's kinda sick. — Jeff Dunham

I think a lot more people are able to take on a design challenge than ever before. And this was true 20 years ago when the desktop publishing revolution came about that allowed people with Macintosh's at home to produce professional-looking newsletters or publications for the first time. So, there's a long march toward more democratization for design. — Khoi Vinh

To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard. — Bill Gates

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: "Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end". — Douglas Adams

Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream. — Steven Moore

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door. — Billy Collins

The Macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one. — Steve Jobs

Yes, we like to think of our children as Macintosh computers operating in a world full of PCs; they get the same answers but process things differently. — Gina Gallagher

If Macintosh hadn't been successful, then I should have just thrown in the towel, because my vision of the whole industry would have been totally wrong. — Steve Jobs

The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing. — Guy Kawasaki

He worked for two hours, perfecting the storyline-the situation, the setup, the punchline.After changing her tire and practicing macho lines to impress her, Macintosh ended up with five dollars, a stutter, and soaked shoes as Veronica zoomed out of his life. — Nora Roberts

CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna's firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving — Walter Isaacson

I just had a romance that I really care about, a lot-I mean, a lot-go up in smoke. Because of the stress, and the sort of other woman that Macintosh is. — Steve Jobs

Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker's code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker. — Walter Isaacson

I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn't a strict vision between sort of science and art. — Steve Jobs

You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you're not passionate enough from the start, you'll never stick it out. — Steve Jobs

The Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster," which did not enhance its popularity. — Walter Isaacson

October arrives in a swirl of fragrant blue leaf smoke, the sweetness of slightly frosted MacIntosh apples, and little hard acorns falling. We are in the midst of cool crisp days, purple mists, and Nature recklessly tossing her whole palette of dazzling tones through fields and woodlands. — Jean Hersey

I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. — Steve Jobs

Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance. — Stephen King

Everything is important- that success is in the details. — Steve Jobs

ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother — Walter Isaacson

I was asked to do TV ads for Macintosh. Nowadays, I think anybody would jump at that but, at the time, it didn't feel appropriate for what I was trying to stand for. — DJ Shadow

father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford — Walter Isaacson

Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right. — Steve Jobs

If I had not studied music, there would be no Macintosh computers today. — Jef Raskin

The grandiose plans of what Macintosh was gonna be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing. And the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible, it was salvageable. But the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something, and that somebody was John Sculley. — Chris Espinosa

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country ... I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this ... It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. — Steve Jobs

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things. — John C. Dvorak

Microsoft certainly makes products for the Macintosh. — Melinda Gates

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. — Steve Jobs

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh. — Steve Jobs

The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity. — Clive Thompson

Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't. — Philip Greenspun

Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP. — Guy Kawasaki

You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. — Steve Jobs

And extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant — Walter Isaacson

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

Transparency once meant being able to "open the hood" to see how things worked. Now, with the Macintosh meaning of transparency dominant in the computer culture, it means quite the opposite: being able to use a program without knowing how it works. — Sherry Turkle

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

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited. — Lawrence Lessig

The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%. — Douglas Adams

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. — Steve Jobs

I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America ... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world. — John Sculley

I have all of the Apple products. Everything I've ever written, I've written on a Mac. My first computer, my roommates and I chipped in, and we got that first Macintosh - 128K. It had as much memory as a greeting card that plays music. — Aaron Sorkin

I hate mice. The mouse involves you in arm motions that slow you down. I didn't want it on the Macintosh, but Jobs insisted. In those days, what he said went, good idea or not. — Jef Raskin

More and more people back then, and not just Andrew MacIntosh, had found ensuring the survival of the human race a total bore. — Kurt Vonnegut

When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. "Real artists sign their work," he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. "With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art," said Atkinson. — Walter Isaacson

Jobs's intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him- the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store-he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something - a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug- he would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.
He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism. — Walter Isaacson

Thinking of Macintosh's reaction to Veronica, Grant felt a wave of empathy. "Poor kid's going to be mooning like a puppy for a month. Did you have to smile at him?"
"Really,Grant.He can't be more than fifteen."
"Old enough to break out in a sweat," he commented.
"Hormones," she murmured as she found Fairfield's sparse selection of wine. "They just need time to balance."
Grant's gaze drifted down and focused as she bent over. "It should only take thirty or forty years," he muttered. — Nora Roberts

The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. — Steve Jobs

As it turned out, Microsoft wasn't able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant. — Walter Isaacson

At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later. — Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple II DOS program in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. "You're just wasting your time with that!" Jobs replied. "Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!" With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord to Hertzfeld's Apple II, causing the code he was working on to vanish. — Walter Isaacson

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? — Steve Jobs

Everyone has a religion, whether they admit it or not. For some it's Catholicism; for others, Vegetarianism or Elvis or Linux/Macintosh/Windows. — Guy Consolmagno

We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh. — Andy Hertzfeld