Steve Jobs in 2007, on Apple’s Pursuit of PC Market Share: ‘We Just Can’t Ship Junk’

In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Molly Wood, then at CNet, asked, “And so, I guess once and for all, is it your goal to overtake the PC in market share?”

The audience — along with Cook, Jobs, and Schiller — chuckled. And then Jobs answered. You should watch the video — it’s just two minutes — but here’s what he said:

I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you, there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk.

So there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. And we think there’s a very significant slice of the industry that wants that too. And what you’ll find is our products are usually not premium priced. You go and price out our competitors’ products, and you add the features that you have to add to make them useful, and you’ll find in some cases they are more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer stripped-down lousy products. We just don’t offer categories of products like that. But if you move those aside and compare us with our competitors, I think we compare pretty favorably. And a lot of people have have been doing that and saying that now for the last 18 months.

Steve Jobs would have loved the MacBook Neo. Everything about it, right down to the fact that Apple is responsible for the silicon.

★ Thursday, 5 March 2026