Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing what he did best: reframing dominance as taste, not conquest. The line lands because it punctures Silicon Valley’s reflex to equate success with total market capture. By comparing Apple to BMW, Mercedes, and Porsche, he grabs a culturally loaded shorthand: premium brands that don’t need to outsell Toyota to matter. They win on desire, engineering mystique, and a certain smug coherence. Apple, he implies, should be judged by the same rubric.

The intent is defensive and strategic at once. Defensive, because Apple has often been the “minority” platform in raw share terms, especially against Windows and later in various consumer electronics categories. Strategic, because Jobs is signaling the company’s real goal: command the profitable, influential segment, where margins are fat and brand loyalty becomes identity. The subtext is that a smaller slice can still set the agenda. BMW doesn’t have to own the road to define what “driving” should feel like; Apple doesn’t have to own every desktop to define what “computing” should feel like.

There’s also a sly insult embedded in the question. “What’s wrong” suggests something vaguely desperate about wanting to be the mass-market default. Jobs turns the usual tech scoreboard into a status ladder: do you want to be a commodity car, or the car people dream about? It’s not humility. It’s a justification for a controlled ecosystem, curated design, and price discipline - an argument that Apple’s power isn’t counted in units, but in cultural gravity.