Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

In our final design, we made punctuation and numbers available under a separate layout accessible by tapping a .?123 key. We worried there would be howls and complaints about the inconvenience of this arrangement, but it turned out to be one of those things that people adapted to readily and accepted without much fuss.

“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”

That explanation is too simple.

to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful in their everyday lives.

Greg often provided the insight that some difficult development path was the best way to make our products easier to use.

But if you’re expecting to read a handbook about the “Seven Elements That Made Apple Great,” I hope you’ll see that working in the Apple style is not a matter of following a checklist.

My friend continued to respect Steve’s taste, even though he deplored his temperament.

Steve believed she’d do better with a product that wasn’t loaded down with every thingamabob the product designers could dream up. He believed that stripping away nonessential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and

While other companies design beautiful hardware, excel at marketing, hire good lawyers, and manufacture gadgets at scale, no other company makes software as intuitive, carefully crafted, or just plain fun. If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products, it’s in the software, and I’ll tell you how we created some of the most important software in the