Design Is Not Just What It

Jobs made this observation in an interview published in The New York Times Magazine on November 30, 2003, with journalist Rob Walker. The interview was written in the context of the iPod's explosive rise as a cultural icon, and Walker asked Jobs to explain what Apple's vaunted "sense of design" actually meant in practice. Jobs' answer challenged the common assumption that design is primarily a visual exercise: "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer." The full quote is a paraphrase of his longer answer in that conversation.