Although I receive a small salary from Apple, I do virtually no real work at the company.
I believe you should have a world where you've got to license something at a fair price.
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.
The way I did it, every job was A+.
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.
The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.
I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things.
I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
Steve Jobs had very strong feelings about what makes a company great, what makes products great. He more or less chose Tim Cook to be in that role, in that position.
When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.
I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.
Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
Not every Apple product makes a big enough difference to me to get instantly, although many do.
Don't worry that you can't seem to come up with sure billion dollar winners at first. Just do projects for yourself for fun. You'll get better and better.
