Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, i... See more

However, at a time when IBM and the Soviet government declined to develop the personal computer, hobbyists like the members of the California Homebrew Computer Club resolved to do it by themselves. It was a conscious ideological decision, influenced by the 1960s counterculture with its anarchist ideas of power to the people and libertarian distrust

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Hertzfeld recalled. It had been a grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees. On the day he unveiled the M... See more

In those days there was no money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and investors, analysts—those kind of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were—they didn't think that this was going to be a real big market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radio

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About 2 months later we got a call from a fellow by the name of Bob Belleville, who had been at Xerox and then had moved on to Apple and was responsible for the overall engineering management for the Macintosh. He said, "I want to bring Steve Jobs over and see what you guys are doing." So they came over, we went through the same spiel, an

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