With the early prototypes, I held the phone to my ear and my ear [would] dial the number. You have to detect all sorts of ear-shapes and chin shapes, skin colour and hairdo... that was one of just many examples where we really thought, perhaps this isn’t going to work.

Goal we've always had for design at Apple is to create solutions that are inevitable.

To do something innovative means that you reject reason.

The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.

We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.

Simplification is one of the most difficult things to do.

In our quest to quickly make three-dimensional objects, we can miss out on the experience of making something that helps give us our first understandings of form and material, of the way a material behaves--'I press too hard here, and it breaks here' and so on. Some of the digital rendering tools are impressive, but it's important that people still really try and figure out a way of gaining direct experience with the materials.