Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.

Well, things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s sort of like … you know your olfactory sense is your most poignant sense in terms of its connection to your memory? You can smell something, in your thirties, and it’ll take you right back to when you were seven years old. The gift that Bob gave me was that connection and sense of smell, that strong connection back to some wonderful era of this valley that I lived in but [only] through him got a very strong sense of what it was. It’s hard to explain. But if you could sort of transmit—when you smell that smell, and it takes you back to when you were seven—if you could give that to somebody else, that was kind of what he was able to give to me. And I don’t know how it happens, but you know it. And I was curious.

In normal life, the difference in dynamic range from average to best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good: rarely. So the difference between an average meal in downtown Palo Alto tonight and the best one—maybe it’s two to one. Flight home, if you’re going home for the holidays: 50 percent difference. Rental cars, breakfast cereals. I don’t know, pick one. But I saw that Woz [Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak]—one guy—having meetings in his head could run circles around two hundred engineers at Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought, “Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first. Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten years to actually try to put it into practice.

We don’t have to go home at night and tell our kids when they say, “Well, what do you do? What did you do today?” “Well, I worked on our next-generation server, you know, that’ll be powering something or other.” We can say, “I worked on our next-generation iPad. You know, the ones that you use in school.” And that’s a really wonderful thing.