Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is smuggling a manifesto into a design tip: beauty is the byproduct, not the mission. By insisting the Mac’s design was “primarily… how it worked,” he’s pushing back against the easy critique that Apple sells sheen. The subtext is tactical. In the 1980s and again in Apple’s 1990s comeback mythology, “design” was often dismissed as casing and marketing. Jobs reclaims the word to mean systems thinking - the choreography of hardware, software, and human habit until the seams disappear.

The line “you have to get it” is doing a lot of gatekeeping. He’s not describing a process so much as a standard for belonging: if you don’t “grok” the object, you’re not qualified to touch it. That’s classic Jobs, a leader who fused taste with authority. “Grok,” borrowed from sci-fi slang, also signals his preferred tribe: the nerd-artist hybrid who treats technology as culture, not just engineering. It’s a subtle dig at both surface-level stylists and checkbox product managers.

The chewing metaphor is the punch. “Not just quickly swallow it” frames shallow understanding as consumption - fast, passive, and ultimately incurious. “Chew it up” implies friction, patience, even discomfort: you stay with the problem long enough to discover what users can’t articulate. In that sense, the quote isn’t romantic. It’s a warning that great design is expensive in attention, and that the cost has to be paid upfront by people obsessed enough to sweat the invisible parts.