Steve Jobs on iBook and Apple's Turnaround: We Have That Possibility

We just wanted to get together and celebrate a little today. I'm a little grubby. I'm still trying to get some sleep and stuff from last week. We had a very good week last week in New York. I know many of you were there. I hope the rest of you had a chance to watch part of the webcast. We introduced our iBook and everybody loved it.

The show was amazing. It was the biggest New York Mac World ever. We had almost 50,000 people there. It was up almost over a 30-minute show. The first thing that I wanted to do was just say last week went great if you weren't there. We got some great press this week on the iBook if you've seen Time or Newsweek or Businessweek. All of the online stuff is just phenomenal. I know we have a lot of people here who worked on the iBook in engineering, in operations, in marketing, in finance, and in really every area of the company. You should be really proud of this.

Everybody's just going nuts over it, including our competitors. What everybody's saying about it is that Apple is on a roll with the iMac and they're now taking it even up another level with the iBook. I think the iMac is a really hard app to follow. I think iBook has absolutely followed it in style. I think you should be really proud of yourselves. It's awesome. I know you've all seen iBooks probably. Most of you have seen them anyway. If you haven't, we have some over in the cafe you can go take a look at. The product is truly awesome.

It's hard to build a consumer portable because you can't put in all the latest, greatest stuff and still make it affordable. So you've got to use panels that are a little thicker than you'd like, drives that are a little thicker than you'd like, and you can cheese out and put in tiny little displays and things like that. If you want to make a really good product, it's really hard. Our team did it. You've all seen it. It's just incredibly beautiful. The way we announced this last week was we announced the iBook and went through all the features and everybody was just going nuts over it. Then we started browsing the web while we were just walking around, figure out what might be going on. Then we told them about AirPort and they just lost it.

This is something that people have been dreaming about for over a decade. Education in particular has been dreaming about. We were able to work with Lucent on this wireless networking in the best way that Apple does things. We were able to really extract some technology out of their labs and help them turn it into a very low-cost product, much lower than they thought they could do. Of course, package it and take it to market and do all of the software work to make it all transparent. So when you plug in an AirPort card into an iBook, you don't sit there and configure the thing for an hour and have all your apps break and things like that. It just works.

It's really a testament to the software work that's done in our software group and in our hardware group to make this all work. There were macOS changes we needed to make and, of course, a lot of driver work and low-level software work as well. You guys have done an awesome job. Congratulations. Now, as you know, two years ago, we had taken a ton of work on all of your parts to get us here, and I thank you, because you completely overhauled Apple, and you completely overhauled the product line, and we now have the most kick-ass product line, not only in the industry, but that Apple has ever had in its history as a company.

So congratulations. Another thing worth pointing out is that, although we are just now getting the iBook into that last quadrant, the other three products are all on their second or third iterations. We're actually on our third PowerMac G3. We are on our second PowerBook G3, and we are on our second RAM of the iMac. Remember, in January, we did life savers. So each of the other three products has already been turned over at least once, and that's the mode we're going to be in now, is turning those products and those quadrants over much more frequently to keep them very, very far ahead of our competitors, very fresh, and always something new coming from Apple, and yet it's very understandable what it is, where it fits in, who it's for.

Right? Make sense? That's our plan. Very simple. One last thing I wanted to talk about today was, you know, two things, actually. A lot of people have declared our turnaround officially complete, and you would have to say that's true. We've had seven consecutive profitable quarters. We made $200 million last quarter. That's a lot of money. And we've got great products, but, you know, I never looked at it that way. The reason I came here had nothing to do with turning Apple around, because, you know, that's about the company, and I know we all love this company, but what we love even more is putting these great products out into the world and seeing people use them.

And so the reason I came back here, and I'm sure the reason you're here, isn't to turn Apple around. It's to make Apple great again. Right? And I think we now have that possibility. We now have that possibility. With the work that you've all done in the last two years, the foundation we have now is really great. The technology foundation, the marketplace foundation, the capabilities we've built in every area of the company, from operations, it's got the best operational excellence in the business now, even better than Dell, to engineering, which clearly is doing the best engineering work in the industry, to marketing, I think our marketing is now the best in the industry, and arguably some of the best in the world.

Our design capability, our industrial design capability, mechanical engineering capabilities, we've built so many capabilities, or rebuilt so many capabilities, and built some way beyond where Apple's ever had them, that we now have this incredible foundation to, I think, really do some awesome stuff in the next few years, and make Apple truly a great leader, not just within our industry, but the kind of company that is a great leader, period, in the world. So that's why I'm here, and I think we have that shot right now, due to a lot of hard work that everybody's done over the last two years. And the reason now, the strategic reason that we have that shot, is because we're the last company in the...

to make the whole widget. Put risk here, because it's innovation. We've got to convince peripheral manufacturers, convince our customers that this is going to be one of our strategic initiatives, let's go for it, and align behind that and bring innovation to the marketplace in a way that when you have to convince five companies, it's very hard. Another example, same thing as Firewire, right? Firewire's another core technology. This time we happened to invent that one, finally decided to use it. And we're building it into our machines one by one. And again, the PC industry can't get their act together on this. Hardware, software, evangelism, marketing, all working together to bring innovation to the marketplace.

And wireless is a third. I mean, this technology's been out there waiting to happen. But, you know, if you went to Compaq or Dell, they'd go, well, I don't know. I mean, it's not an industry standard. Well, it is an industry standard, actually. But nobody's using it yet. Plus, it doesn't work with Windows. I mean, go get Microsoft to do it. Go talk to Microsoft. They go, well, this is not high volume. We've got 38 million things wrong with our software. We'll put it at the bottom of the list. We'll get to it in three years. And you get these other situations like Microsoft. They say, well, if Dell and Compaq were shipping it in high volume, then we'd make the software to make it work. But, you know, it's a chicken and egg thing. We can break through those things and bring innovation to customers because we're the last people in this business who give a shit about making great computers.

And we control enough of it. And I think, you know, as we've come back to our roots and said, hey, it's okay if we don't, you know, aggressively sell to corporate enterprise customers. That's not why Apple was put on this earth. It'd be fun, but we're not going to go make a frontal assault on the enterprise. We're going to go and sell to creative professionals who we love selling to and they love us. We're going to regain our leadership position in education. Our market share is still number one. We're going to start taking back market share that we lost over the last five years. And we're going to come back into the supermarket with a vengeance.

And these are our customers. It just feels good to me. This is why Apple was put on this earth. To serve these kinds of customers. And it just so happens that, you know, I think we are gaining market share in the creative professional market. We're gaining market share in education. We're gaining market share in the consumer market. And I think we have a chance for explosive growth in the consumer market and very strong regaining of market share in the education market and even some gaining of market share in the creative professional market. So I think our prospects are looking pretty good. And I think we're in exactly the right place with exactly the right core assets and strategy to take advantage of these explosions. And I think it will be very exciting these few years. And I think there's very few companies that can make products as cool as ours and get them out to millions and millions and millions of people.

We're shipping four to five million computers a year now. That's a lot. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of computers. And it's a big opportunity to change the way people think about computers, to change the way people think about design, and to put things out into the cold with something truly great. We have four great products moving into our biggest quarter of all, the Christmas quarter. And I happen to know all the things in the pipeline. I can tell you there's so many more great things coming. It's unbelievable. The products are just unbelievable. The best stuff I've ever seen in my life. So I think we're going to be able to really rock and roll the next few years. So congratulations.

And we've got some food and we've got some iBooks right over there in the cafe. Thank you. Are you going to block for me?