Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is selling a paradox: the most profitable kind of self-indulgence. “Zillions” is a wink at the spreadsheet crowd, but he immediately pivots to a purist credo - the Mac wasn’t built to satisfy customers so much as to satisfy taste. The line that matters isn’t the bravado about sales; it’s the refusal of “market research,” framed as moral contamination. In Jobs-world, asking people what they want is an admission you don’t know what greatness looks like.

The subtext is a bid for authority. By positioning the team as “the group of people who were going to judge,” he converts design into an internal tribunal: a closed room where standards are set by makers, not committees. That’s not democracy; it’s auteur theory applied to hardware. It also smuggles in a definition of the user: not the median consumer, but an idealized, demanding person who thinks like the designers do. Build for yourselves, he implies, and you’ll build for the best version of the public.

Context sharpens the intent. The early Macintosh era was an insurgent moment inside a company already flirting with bloat and corporate caution. This rhetoric becomes a weapon against consensus, and a justification for vertical control: fewer options, tighter integration, a product that feels “inevitable” because it’s authored, not negotiated.

It works because it flatters two audiences at once. Internally, it sanctifies obsession. Externally, it invites buyers to join a tribe that didn’t ask permission. The punchline is that “for ourselves” is also a marketing strategy - just one wrapped in the language of integrity rather than demand curves.