"I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains"
About this Quote
The subtext is bigger than personal branding. Hawkins is making a quiet argument about what computers are for and what they’re missing. If you build mobile computers and also study brains, you’re implying today’s machines are incomplete imitations. Mobility isn’t just a hardware constraint; it’s a hint at embodied intelligence, the way cognition evolved to move through the world, predict, adapt, and conserve energy. “Study brains” becomes a kind of R&D pipeline: neuroscience as the user manual for next-gen computation.
Context matters: Hawkins helped shape early handheld computing (Palm) while pushing theories of intelligence that resist the brute-force, scale-is-everything approach. The sentence reads like a thesis for a certain Silicon Valley archetype: the inventor who’s impatient with siloed expertise and convinced that understanding mind is the master key for building better machines. It works because it’s simple enough to be quotable, but loaded enough to be a worldview.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hawkins, Jeff. (2026, January 15). I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-do-two-things-i-design-mobile-computers-and-i-171170/
Chicago Style
Hawkins, Jeff. "I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-do-two-things-i-design-mobile-computers-and-i-171170/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-do-two-things-i-design-mobile-computers-and-i-171170/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.






