Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is picking a fight with a word that got domesticated. By framing “most people” as stuck on “veneer,” he draws a bright line between surface polish and the harder, less glamorous work of deciding what a thing is for. The curtain-and-sofa imagery is strategic: it casts mainstream “design” as passive consumption, a lifestyle accessory, something you apply after the real decisions are made. Then he flips it with a near-theatrical dismissal: “nothing could be further.” It’s not a disagreement; it’s a moral separation.

The subtext is classic Jobs: design is an argument about priorities. If you treat design as decoration, you’re free to ship clunky software, confusing interfaces, and compromised hardware as long as it photographs well. Jobs is insisting that “design” lives upstream, where constraints, engineering, and user behavior collide. This is a way of defending Apple’s obsession with integration - the refusal to let the “inside” be messy just because customers can’t see it. (And, conveniently, it’s also a way to justify control: if design is foundational, then someone has to be in charge of the foundation.)

Context matters: this line comes out of an era when “designed” was becoming a marketing adjective - think late-90s/early-2000s consumer tech and lifestyle branding. Jobs is reclaiming the term to mean system-level thinking, not styling. It works because it shames superficiality while offering a more demanding, almost ethical definition: design as how a product behaves, not how it poses.