For many years, working at Apple gave me financial stability, acceptance from a group of talented colleagues, and a worldwide reach for my software. Steve Jobs provided his single-minded focus on making great products, and his vision motivated me. Everything clicked.
In this book, I’ve spent much time discussing the lessons I learned during my Apple career. The biggest lesson I learned as I wrote this book is how a group of people and the culture they create are one and the same. After Steve died, the Apple software development culture started to change. As time passed and other coworkers came and went, the culture changed more. By my last day at Apple in 2017, few of the people I’ve mentioned in this book remained at the company, and more than anything, I missed collaborating with them as we had in the stories I’ve told. As I write, I still feel a strong bond to Apple, its products, and the people I worked with in more recent years, but it was time for me to move on.
A couple weeks before I resigned from the company, I worked on one final project, an exhibition for the Design Museum in London. Apple was putting together a display about the iPhone as part of an installation called California: Designing Freedom, which would feature many West Coast American influences, from the 1960s counterculture to Silicon Valley high tech. My contribution was to revive my original keyboard autocorrection code as an example of the multitouch operating system we invented ten years earlier. I retrieved the software from our source code archives, and I got it running on a modern version of iOS so some Apple designers could refer to it as they made a high-resolution animation of the keyboard for the museum show. It was a pleasure to look at that code—and spend a few hours with it—one last time before I departed.
Now that I’ve left Apple and devoted the time to write this book, my thoughts turn to the future.
As we look for new solutions to new problems, I suggest we turn to the tools I’ve described—the essential elements, creative selection, and a culture built around them. Naturally, it’s possible to use any set of tools to do excellent or shoddy work, or to employ them to achieve worthy aims or trivial ones. We should choose wisely, because the iPhone demonstrates the societal impact a successful product can have, both good and bad.
I’d like to end with a note to readers at the beginning of their careers. You might be telling yourself that you want a career in product development. You may have plans to do great things in some other field. Either way, I have some advice: Get busy. Decide what it means to do great work, and then try to make it happen. Success is never assured, and the effort might not be easy, but if you love what you’re doing, it won’t seem so hard.