Quotes About Technology

Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book. (Steven Levy)

for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it's better, it's simpler, and it's at the forefront of technology. That's where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.

One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will, he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product.

There would be times when we'd rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we'd considered every option, and he would go, Did you think of this? said Fadell. And then we'd all go, Holy Shit. He'd redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.

When it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being "worth thousands and thousands of dollars," and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price: "We're going to be charging higher education a single price of $6,500.

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.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy.

In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone. 

Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he answered, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.

He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur... He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn't. He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.

Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I'm pretty sure I could make out, 'Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!

Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

We kind of missed the boat on that, he recalled. So we needed to catch up real fast. 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 find itself behind.

Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.

we have entered a third and even more momentous era, a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.

He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that." Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts.

I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world," Steve Wozniak later recalled. "It takes society to a new level.

Not since the original Mac had a clarity of product vision so propelled a company into the future. If anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example

The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts

Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.