Success Quote by Steve Jobs

"Design is a funny word" is Jobs doing what he did best: taking a term everyone thinks they understand and yanking it away from the surface. The joke isn’t punchline humor; it’s a setup that exposes a cultural misunderstanding. In most consumer culture, "design" gets reduced to styling - the glossy casing, the fashionable silhouette, the stuff you can photograph. Jobs frames that as a shallow consensus, then pivots with "of course" to imply the real definition should be obvious to anyone paying attention. That little rhetorical nudge is classic Jobs: he presents a contested belief as common sense, recruiting the listener into his worldview.

The deeper move is moral. "How it works" is not just functionality; it’s a philosophy of responsibility. If design is operation, not decoration, then the designer is accountable for the user’s experience - the friction, the confusion, the tiny daily annoyances that companies often offload onto customers with manuals and menus. Jobs is also quietly elevating engineering to the status of artistry, collapsing the usual hierarchy where aesthetics are celebrated and systems are tolerated.

Context matters: Jobs was selling a product culture where the interface is the brand. Apple’s competitive advantage wasn’t only sleek hardware; it was the insistence that complexity be metabolized by the product, not the person using it. The subtext is a rebuke to feature-bloat and tech machoism. Real sophistication, he suggests, looks like simplicity because someone did the hard work behind the scenes.