The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there's not enough information to do that - it's an intuitive process.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

To follow the path that others have laid before you is a reasonable course of action; therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

Recruiting is hard. It's just finding the needles in the haystack. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview.

There's no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook.

We don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet-- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock--open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it-- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it.