Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing what he did best here: turning a product decision into a moral position. On the surface, it’s a sizing argument about screens. Underneath, it’s a preemptive strike against a market that was starting to heat up with smaller, cheaper tablets. By framing the choice as “great” versus “not great,” he pulls the discussion away from cost, competition, and compromise and into Apple’s preferred territory: taste, standards, and inevitability.

The structure is classic Jobsian jujitsu. He grants the obvious counterargument (“price point”) only to dismiss it as beside the point. That move matters because it inoculates Apple against the accusation that it can’t or won’t play in the budget lane. Instead, he implies Apple is abstaining out of principle, not limitation. “We don’t think you can” also spreads responsibility: it’s not just Apple refusing; it’s reality itself refusing. A seven-inch tablet becomes not a different product, but a category error.

Context does the heavy lifting. This was the post-iPad moment, when Apple was trying to define what a tablet is before the market defined it for them. Jobs’ subtext is simple: fragmentation is failure. If small tablets win, “great” becomes relative, and Apple’s premium narrative gets harder to sustain. The line draws a boundary around the iPad as the canonical tablet and casts everyone else as making shrunken, lesser approximations.

History, of course, undercuts the certainty: Apple eventually shipped the iPad mini. Which only sharpens what the quote really reveals: “great” was never a measurement; it was a strategy.