Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.

Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

I’m not a futurist.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that’s a problem that’s probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that’s actually within the range of affordability.

You don’t have to turn on the TV set. You don’t have to work on the Internet. It’s up to you.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

I read ‚The High Frontier‘ in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there’s always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.

I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process.

I think right now it’s a battle for the mindshare of developers and for the mindshare of customers, and right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

The Internet, man, is a beautiful thing.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

The majority of people who don’t have Internet, don’t have the Internet because they don’t know why they want to use the Internet.

Ebooks had to happen.

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‚Doctor Who.‘ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.

People everywhere love Windows.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

I like the word ‚autopilot‘ more than I like the word ‚self-driving.‘ ‚Self-driving‘ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‚Autopilot‘ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that… There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Innovation is moving at a scarily fast pace.

What really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution – this revolution – is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

Nature hates calculators.

I’m not no Internet person.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Computers double their performance every month.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

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.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, ‚You know, there’s no sound in outer space.‘

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.