As Osborne famously declared, "Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous." Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. "This guy just doesn't get it," Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. "He's not making art, he's making shit.

Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.

In two days he saw Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the top executives at the New York Times; and executives at Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc. magazines. “I would love to help quality journalism,” he later said. “We can’t depend on bloggers for our news.

In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers,” Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. “This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?” Wolff attributed it to Jobs’s mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic individual.” Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial.

I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it.

Стив считал: в гениальном компьютере аппаратное и программное обеспечение должны быть тесно связаны. Если же на компьютер можно было установить программы, совместимые с другими компьютерами, в конечном счете пришлось бы пожертвовать частью его функциональности. Лучшими продуктами Джобс считал те, что продуманы от начала до конца и созданы цельными; программное обеспечение для таких компьютеров создано с учетом аппаратного, и наоборот. Это отличало тактику Macintosh, операционная система которого была совместима только с родным железом, от тактики Microsoft, операционную систему которой можно было использовать на железе, произведенном многими другими компаниями.