All the rumors of Apple releasing a low end iPhone for the benefit of selling more iPhones are FALSE according to Steve Job's philosophy of how and why Apple builds its products:
February 1985:
PB: What's the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull of those insanely great ideas?
SJ: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
PB: Are you saying that the people who made PCjr don't have that kind of pride in the product?
SJ: If they did, they wouldn't have made the PCjr. It seems clear to me that they were designing that on the basis of market research for a specific market segment, for a specific demographic type of customer, and they hoped that if they built this, lots of people would buy them and they'd make lots of money. Those are different motivations. The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.
February 1985:
PB: What's the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull of those insanely great ideas?
SJ: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
PB: Are you saying that the people who made PCjr don't have that kind of pride in the product?
SJ: If they did, they wouldn't have made the PCjr. It seems clear to me that they were designing that on the basis of market research for a specific market segment, for a specific demographic type of customer, and they hoped that if they built this, lots of people would buy them and they'd make lots of money. Those are different motivations. The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.
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