After Steve Quotes

“We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation,”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“When Podolny asked during the interview process how many classes should be offered and how large the faculty could be, Jobs scoffed. “If I knew the answers to those questions, I wouldn’t need to hire someone like you,” he said.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation,”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Ive had become interested in the rise of credit cards and meditated on the disconnect between the cheap plastic material and the amount of money people spent with a swipe. He also puzzled over how a merchant could track a purchase instantly, even though a card user had to wait for a mailed paper statement. He imagined a world in which people carried circular medallions the size of a pebble that they would place on a minicomputer at checkout. The glossy black medallion would charge on a device the size of a pocket calculator that displayed transaction information. “He brought a preciousness and a watchmaker’s delicacy to it,” said John Elliott, a Newcastle professor. When Apple released a contactless payment system called Apple Pay decades later, Elliott remembered Ive’s “blue sky” project. “He was twenty years ahead of the game,” he said.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“The $9 billion decrease in iPhone revenue had been the largest drop in a single quarter since 2007. The company’s most important product was running out of steam.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“THE FOLLOWING DAY, the Apple share price fell 10 percent and the company lost $75 billion in value. The single-day decline was Apple’s biggest in six years and sank its valuation to a level it had not seen since February 2017. It shook the U.S. economy. The company had become one of the most widely held institutional stocks, included in mutual funds, index funds, and 401(k)s. Thanks in part to Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, everyone from grandmothers in Florida to autoworkers in the Midwest had an interest in Apple’s business. They all suffered.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Amid a series of heated meetings in early 2019, Cook and Ahrendts agreed to part ways. An abrupt announcement in February that she would leave ignited rumors that she had been fired. Apple’s public relations team swung into action to suppress the rumors, pushing a story that the departure had been planned. Indeed, Ahrendts told friends, she was ready to leave. She had spent five years at the company and made $173 million. She was ready to exit an empire where an aloof CEO assaulted staff with interrogation.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Its track record in services was mixed. iTunes had been a runaway success that had transformed the music industry, but Apple Maps had been a bust. MobileMe, a 2008 online service for email, contacts, and calendar, hadn’t worked, and Siri, Apple’s novel voice assistant, had fallen behind its rivals in performance. In the absence of the next game-changing device, Cook was betting that he could persuade customers to stick with iPhones by getting them as tethered to Apple Music and other services as they had been”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“After years of being hounded by the same question—What’s the next new device?—Cook had finally delivered his answer: There isn’t one. His message hadn’t been aimed at Main Street; it was for Wall Street. He wanted investors to see that Apple was making a major shift. Rather than its products creating glory, Cook outlined a future in which Apple basked in the glory of others. He didn’t want to merely update the iPhone every year; he wanted people to pay Apple subscription fees for the movies they watched on that iPhone. He didn’t want to enable digital payments; he wanted Apple to be the processor of every transaction. And he didn’t want Apple to make the screen on which people read articles; he wanted to sell access to the magazines they read. For years, Cook had seen new revenue opportunities in each of those businesses. He had plotted a path to get there, buying Beats in 2014, courting Hollywood agents and directors in the years that had followed, and forging strong ties with Goldman Sachs throughout that time. He saw in all of it a way to shed the burden of a device business that was running out of juice and enter a world of services that promised unlimited growth.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“As Wall Street digested the strategy, Apple’s share price soared. It nearly doubled by the end of the year. The longtime darling of Main Street had become a darling of Wall Street. Cook’s conquest was complete.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“In an email reflecting on their leadership, Laurene Powell Jobs said the company’s endurance would not have been possible without the contributions of both men. They had played to each other’s strengths, she said, while sustaining their “shared love of Steve and Apple.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“principles that Jobs had made central to the company’s identity: the conviction that a team, not individuals, achieve great things in business; the imperative that staff refuse to accept work that was “good enough” and always push to deliver the “insanely great”; and the commitment that every product they create be beautiful.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“He thought about Apple until his last day,” Cook said, “and among his last advice for me and for all of you was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,’ he said.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Less than fifteen miles away, Ive sat in the garden outside Jobs’s home. The October sky above was hazy that day and his shoes were too tight. Cook joined him and they sat together for a long time. Ive felt numb as he recalled the last words Jobs told him: I will miss our talks together.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“It began to dawn on me then that the purpose of life wasn’t to love your job’, [Cook] told a group of Oxford students [in 2007]. ‘It was to serve humanity in some broad way, and the outcome of doing that would mean that you would love your job. I began to realize I wasn’t in a place to do that [at IBM].”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“The Cooks pulled a rare small-town feat, managing to be known but unknown.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“[Jobs and Forstall] would have lunch together regularly in the Apple cafeteria, where workers swiped their badges at the checkout register and the price of their meals was deducted from their paychecks. Jobs insisted on swiping his badge to pay for lunch. ‘This is great’, said Jobs, who wasn’t taking a salary. ‘I only get paid a dollar a year. I don’t know who’s paying’.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Ive’s design team had obsessed over the rounded corners of the phone and become advocates of Bézier curves, a concept from computer modeling used to eliminate the transition breaks between straight and curved surfaces. The Bézier geometry gave the iPhone rounded corners that arched like a sculpture. A standard rounded corner consists of a single-radius arch or a quarter circle, whereas their curves were mapped through a dozen points, creating a more gradual and natural transition. Meanwhile, Forstall used a standard three-point curve in the corners of iPhone apps. Each time Ive opened his iPhone, he could see the difference between the phone’s carefully crafted corners and the software’s clunky corners. He was powerless to change those features because Jobs excluded him from software design meetings. He could only look at them and fume.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“On average, five hundred iPhones were sold each minute, twenty-four hours a day. Apple moved $600 iPhones at the same rate McDonald’s moved $5 Big Macs.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“As Hönig and Zorkendorfer flipped through the papers, they were surprised to find a detailed proposal to reduce costs by using a less expensive manufacturing technique for the watch crown. The design team wanted to cut each crown with a computer-controlled machine, a CNC tool, that would have unrivaled precision resulting in a more beautiful and realistic crown. Yet, the operations staff proposed a low-priced laser-cutting process that would save millions of dollars. “That’s not Apple,” Zorkendorfer said. “That’s something Samsung would do,” Hönig added.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“The capital repurchases lifted Apple’s stock price and quieted Icahn, who eventually sold his shares for a profit of $1.83 billion. Cook cannily followed Icahn’s advice and drove the company’s share price up by doing something his predecessor would never have considered.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“The truth was, Ive had been slipping out of focus for years. Apple was no longer his beautiful creation. He was no longer the star of the show. The cameras no longer clicked for him, and news anchors no longer invited him to wax poetically about design. The outside world wanted to know what the company was going to do about tariffs, immigration, and privacy. They wanted Cook. The creative soul of Apple had been eclipsed by the machine.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Cook didn’t let his romanticism interfere with negotiations. Before accepting the job, he insisted that Apple commit to paying him the salary and options he was forgoing at Compaq. The total was more than $1 million, greater than anything Apple had offered an executive to that point. Jobs exploded when he heard the demand. “There’s no way Apple can do this!” he screamed at executive recruiter Rick Devine, who had found Cook. “What are you thinking? Do you understand math?”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“If staff from engineering or operations didn’t bring reverence to the discussion, if they talked too loudly, or even worse, if they brought up costs, they would later discover that their badge no longer accessed the studio; their admittance had been silently revoked.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“After the initial sales of about twenty thousand units, orders plummeted, and the company wound up slashing production. It became known inside the company as “the failed trash can.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“The decision pushed him into the world of computers, a field he’d never really considered, and helped shape his belief that a rewarding life requires a mix of preparation and good fortune. When he returned to Auburn decades later to give the 2010 commencement address, he urged graduates to prepare themselves in anticipation that their opportunity would come just as his had that day with the recruiter from IBM. “We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation,” he said.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Jeff, if you left your phone at home and got to the office without it, would you go back and get it?” he asked. “Yes,” Williams said. “If you left your watch at home, would you go back to get it?” Dauber asked. Williams paused and thought. “No,” he said. “I’d get it when I got back home.” “That’s why we can’t ship this,” Dauber said. “It’s not ready. It’s not great.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Shortly afterward, Cook faced another unexpected personal challenge: he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease threatened to disable his brain and impair his spinal cord. He later learned that it had been a misdiagnosis, but the health scare inspired him to raise money for MS research and contributed to a period of introspection. Around that time, he found himself asking: What is my life’s purpose? “It began to dawn on me then that the purpose of life wasn’t to love your job,” he told a group of Oxford students two decades later. “It was to serve humanity in some broad way, and the outcome of doing that would mean that you would love your job. I began to realize I wasn’t in a place to do that.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“After the blaze burned out, John called Samsung to report the incident. He estimated that the destruction to the nightstand, hardwood floor, and carpets totaled $9,000. The company said it would call him back within twenty-four hours. It never did.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“When Jobs had returned in 1997, he had put the entire company under a single profit-and-loss statement and created an organization whose senior vice presidents managed the various areas of the business.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul