In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Molly Wood, then at CNet, asked, “And so, I guess once and for all, is it your goal to overtake the PC in market share?”
The audience — along with Cook, Jobs, and Schiller — chuckled. And then Jobs answered. You should watch the video — it’s just two minutes — but here’s what he said:
I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best
personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud
to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want
to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you,
there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to
ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and
friends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.So there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who
we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the
industry. And we think there’s a very significant slice of the
industry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products
are usually not premium priced. You go and price out our
competitors’ products, and you add the features that you have to
add to make them useful, and you’ll find in some cases they are
more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer
stripped-down lousy products. We just don’t offer
categories of products like that. But if you move those aside and
compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty
favorably. And a lot of people have have been doing that and
saying that now for the last 18 months.
Steve Jobs would have loved the MacBook Neo. Everything about it, right down to the fact that Apple is responsible for the silicon.
