I actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down. [Laughs]

我实际上在股票下跌时一年内损失了 2.5 亿美元。[笑]

I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years. But it makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a millionaire. When I went to school, it was right after the Sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in. Now students aren’t even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. They certainly are not letting any of the philosophical issues of the day take up too much of their time as they study their business majors. The idealistic wind of the Sixties was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.

我不会让它毁了我的生活。这不是有点搞笑吗？你知道，我对这件钱的事情的主要反应是，它很幽默，所有的关注都集中在这上面，因为这几乎不是我过去十年中发生的最有洞察力或最有价值的事情。但有时候，当我在校园演讲时，发现学生们最敬畏的事实是我是一名百万富翁，这让我感到老。当我上学的时候，正好是在六十年代之后和这种实用目的感普遍流行之前。现在学生们甚至不再以理想主义的方式思考，或者至少没有那么多。他们当然不会让当今的任何哲学问题占用他们学习商业专业的太多时间。不过，六十年代的理想主义风潮仍然在我们身后，我认识的大多数和我同龄的人永远铭刻着这一点。

Young maniacs, I know. 年轻的疯子，我知道。

We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront.

我们正生活在 100 年前石油化工革命的余波中。石油化工革命为我们提供了免费的能源——在这种情况下是免费的机械能。它在许多方面改变了社会的结构。这场革命，信息革命，也是自由能源的革命，但属于另一种：自由的智力能源。今天它仍然很粗糙，但我们的 Macintosh 电脑运行所需的功率比 100 瓦的灯泡还要少，并且可以为你节省每天数小时的时间。十年、二十年或五十年后，它将能够做些什么？这场革命将超越石油化工革命。我们正处于最前沿。

Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this cafe [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward …” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this cafe, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—”Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic. That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked [laughs].

计算机实际上非常简单。我们坐在这家咖啡馆的长椅上[这是采访的部分]。假设你只理解最基本的指示，你问如何找到洗手间。我必须用非常具体和精确的指示来描述给你。我可能会说：“从长椅上侧移两米。站直。抬起左脚。弯曲左膝，直到它水平。伸展左脚，向前移动 300 厘米……”等等。如果你能比咖啡馆里的任何其他人快 100 倍地理解所有这些指示，你就会显得像个魔术师：你可以跑过去拿一杯奶昔，然后把它带回来放在桌子上，打个响指，我会认为你让奶昔出现，因为相对于我的感知，这一切发生得太快了。这正是计算机所做的。它执行这些非常简单的指令——“去取一个数字，把它加到这个数字上，把结果放在那里，判断它是否大于另一个数字”——但以每秒 1000000 次的速度执行它们。在每秒 1000000 次的速度下，结果看起来就像魔法。 这只是一个简单的解释，关键是人们真的不需要理解计算机是如何工作的。大多数人对自动变速器的工作原理没有概念，但他们知道如何开车。你不需要学习物理学来理解运动定律就能开车。你不需要理解这些东西就能使用 Macintosh——但你问了[笑]。

A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it’s going to go. Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they’ll be doing more and more for us.

计算机是我们见过的最不可思议的工具。它可以是写作工具、通讯中心、超级计算器、计划工具、文件管理器和艺术工具，只需提供新的指令或软件即可。没有其他工具具备计算机的力量和多功能性。我们无法预测它将走多远。现在，计算机让我们的生活更轻松。它们在几分之一秒内完成我们需要几个小时才能完成的工作。它们提高了生活质量，有些是通过简单地自动化繁重的工作，有些是通过拓宽我们的可能性。随着事物的发展，它们将为我们做越来越多的事情。

There are different answers for different people. In business, that question is easy to answer: You really can prepare documents much faster and at a higher quality level, and you can do many things to increase office productivity. A computer frees people from much of the menial work. Besides that, you are giving them a tool that encourages them to be creative. Remember, computers are tools. Tools help us do our work better. In education, computers are the first thing to come along since books that will sit there and interact with you endlessly, without judgment. Socratic education isn’t available anymore, and computers have the potential to be a real breakthrough in the educational process when used in conjunction with enlightened teachers. We’re in most schools already.

对于不同的人有不同的答案。在商业中，这个问题很容易回答：你确实可以更快地准备文件，并且质量更高，你可以做很多事情来提高办公室的生产力。计算机使人们摆脱了许多琐碎的工作。除此之外，你还给他们提供了一种鼓励他们创造的工具。记住，计算机是工具。工具帮助我们更好地完成工作。在教育中，计算机是自书籍以来第一个能够与您无休止互动而不带评判的东西。苏格拉底式教育已经不再存在，而计算机在与开明的教师结合使用时，有潜力在教育过程中带来真正的突破。我们已经在大多数学校中。

So far, that’s more of a conceptual market than a real market. The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children. If you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. You know there’s something going on, you don’t exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.

到目前为止，这更多的是一个概念市场，而不是一个真实市场。现在购买家用电脑的主要原因是你想在家做一些商业工作，或者你想为自己或孩子运行教育软件。如果你无法为这两个原因中的任何一个合理化购买电脑，唯一的其他可能原因就是你只是想具备计算机知识。你知道有一些事情正在发生，但你并不确切知道是什么，所以你想学习。这将会改变：计算机在大多数家庭中将是必不可少的。

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

大多数人购买家庭电脑的最有说服力的理由是将其连接到全国通信网络。我们正处于一个真正非凡突破的初始阶段，这对大多数人来说将是一个与电话一样非凡的进步。

I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

我只能开始推测。我们在行业中经常看到这种情况：你不知道最终会产生什么结果，但你知道这将是非常重要和非常好的事情。

In the future, it won’t be an act of faith. The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.

在未来，这将不再是信仰的行为。我们现在面临的困难在于，人们会问你具体的事情，而你却无法告诉他们。一百年前，如果有人问亚历山大·格雷厄姆·贝尔：“你将如何使用电话？”他无法告诉他们电话将如何影响世界。他不知道人们会用电话打电话查询当晚的电影，或者订购一些杂货，或者给在地球另一端的亲戚打电话。但请记住，公共电报是在 1844 年首次启用的。这是通信领域的一个惊人突破。你实际上可以在一个下午内将消息从纽约发送到旧金山。人们谈论在美国的每个办公桌上放置一个电报机以提高生产力。但这并不可行。它要求人们学习一整套奇怪的咒语，摩尔斯电码，点和划，才能使用电报。学习大约需要 40 个小时。大多数人永远不会学会如何使用它。因此，幸运的是，在 1870 年代，贝尔申请了电话的专利。 它基本上执行了与电报相同的功能，但人们已经知道如何使用它。此外，它最棒的地方在于，除了让你用文字交流，它还允许你唱歌。

It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we’re in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are “slash q-zs” and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don’t simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.

它让你用超越简单语言学的意义来表达你的话语。我们今天也处于同样的境地。有些人说我们应该在美国的每个桌子上放一台 IBM PC，以提高生产力。这是行不通的。这次你需要学习的特殊咒语是“slash q-zs”之类的。WordStar 的手册，最流行的文字处理程序，有 400 页厚。要写小说，你必须阅读小说——一本对大多数人来说像是谜一样的小说。他们不会学习 slash q-z，就像他们不会学习摩尔斯电码一样。这就是 Macintosh 的全部意义。它是我们行业的第一个“电话”。而且，对我来说，最棒的地方在于，Macintosh 让你像电话一样唱歌。你不仅仅是传达文字，你还有特殊的打印样式和绘图、添加图片的能力来表达自己。

It’s as significant as the difference between the telephone and the telegraph. Imagine what you could have done if you had this sophisticated an Etch A Sketch when you were growing up. But that’s only a small part of it. Not only can it help you increase your productivity and your creativity enormously, but it also allows us to communicate more efficiently by using pictures and graphs as well as words and numbers.

这就像电话和电报之间的差异一样重要。想象一下，如果你在成长过程中拥有这样一个复杂的电子画板，你能做些什么。但这只是其中的一小部分。它不仅可以极大地提高你的生产力和创造力，还可以通过使用图片和图表以及文字和数字，使我们更有效地沟通。

Most computers use key strokes to enter instructions, but Macintosh replaces many of them with something called a mouse—a little box that is rolled around on your desk and guides a pointer on your computer screen. It’s a big change for people used to keyboards. Why the mouse?

大多数计算机使用按键输入指令，但 Macintosh 用一种叫做鼠标的设备替代了许多按键——一个在桌面上滚动的小盒子，能够引导计算机屏幕上的指针。这对习惯使用键盘的人来说是一个很大的变化。为什么要使用鼠标？

If I want to tell you there is a spot on your shirt, I’m not going to do it linguistically: “There’s a spot on your shirt 14 centimeters down from the collar and three centimeters to the left of your button.” If you have a spot—”There!” [He points]—I’ll point to it. Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.

如果我想告诉你你的衬衫上有一个污点，我不会用语言来表达：“在领口下方 14 厘米，离你的扣子左侧 3 厘米的位置有一个污点。”如果你有一个污点——“那里！”[他指着]——我会指向它。指点是我们都知道的一个比喻。我们做了很多研究和测试，使用鼠标进行各种功能，比如剪切和粘贴，速度要快得多，所以它不仅更容易使用，而且更高效。

It was more than two years on the computer itself. We had been working on the technology behind it for years before that. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.

在计算机上已经超过两年了。在此之前，我们已经在其背后的技术上工作了多年。我想我从未在某件事情上如此努力，但在麦金塔上的工作是我一生中最棒的经历。几乎所有参与其中的人都会这么说。最后我们都不想发布它。就好像我们知道，一旦它离开了我们的手，它就不再属于我们。当我们最终在股东大会上展示它时，礼堂里的每个人都站起来给予了五分钟的热烈掌声。令我感到不可思议的是，我能看到麦金塔团队在前几排。就好像我们都不敢相信我们真的完成了它。每个人都开始哭泣。

[Smiling] We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.

[微笑] 我们对所做的事情充满热情。

Ad campaigns are necessary for competition; IBM’s ads are everywhere. But good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

广告活动对于竞争是必要的；IBM 的广告无处不在。但良好的广告是教育人们；这就是全部。你无法在这个行业里欺骗别人。产品本身就是最好的证明。

We’ve done studies that prove that the mouse is faster than traditional ways of moving through data or applications. Someday we may be able to build a color screen for a reasonable price. As to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. The more we can produce, the lower the price will get——

我们已经做过研究，证明鼠标比传统的数据或应用程序操作方式更快。总有一天，我们可能会以合理的价格制造出彩色屏幕。至于定价过高，新产品的启动使其比以后更贵。我们生产的越多，价格就会越低——

That’s simply untrue. As soon as we can lower prices, we do. It’s true that our computers are less expensive today than they were a few years ago, or even last year. But that’s also true of the IBM PC. Our goal is to get computers out to tens of millions of people, and the cheaper we can make them, the easier it’s going to be to do that. I’d love it if Macintosh cost $1000.

这完全不是真的。只要我们能降低价格，我们就会这样做。我们的电脑今天确实比几年前，甚至去年便宜。但这对 IBM PC 也是如此。我们的目标是让数千万的人使用电脑，价格越便宜，做到这一点就越容易。如果 Macintosh 的价格是 1000 美元，我会非常高兴。

If you want to try that one, add the people who bought the IBM PCs or the PCjrs to that list, too. As far as Lisa is concerned, since some of its technology was used in the Macintosh, it can now run Macintosh software and is being seen as a big brother to Macintosh; though it was unsuccessful at first, our sales of Lisa are going through the roof. We’re also still selling more than 2000 Apple IIIs a month—more than half to repeat buyers. The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

如果你想尝试那个，也把购买了 IBM PC 或 PCjr 的人加入到那个列表中。至于 Lisa，由于其部分技术被用于 Macintosh，它现在可以运行 Macintosh 软件，并被视为 Macintosh 的旧版；尽管最初不成功，但我们的 Lisa 销售量正在飙升。我们每月仍在销售超过 2000 台 Apple III——超过一半是回头客。总体而言，新技术不一定会取代旧技术，但它会使旧技术过时。根据定义，最终它会取代旧技术。但这就像在彩色电视出现时仍拥有黑白电视的人一样。他们最终会决定新技术是否值得投资。

Before Macintosh, there were two standards: Apple II and IBM PC. Those two standards are like rivers carved in the rock bed of a canyon. It’s taken years to carve them—seven years to carve the Apple II and four years to carve the IBM. What we have done with Macintosh is that in less than a year, through the momentum of the revolutionary aspects of the product and through every ounce of marketing that we have as a company, we have been able to blast a third channel through that rock and make a third river, a third standard. In my opinion, there are only two companies that can do that today, Apple and IBM. Maybe that’s too bad, but to do it right now is just a monumental effort, and I don’t think that Apple or IBM will do that in the next three or four years. Toward the end of the Eighties, we may be seeing some new things.

在 Macintosh 之前，有两个标准：Apple II 和 IBM PC。这两个标准就像在峡谷岩床中雕刻出的河流。雕刻它们花费了多年时间——Apple II 花了七年，IBM 花了四年。我们在 Macintosh 上所做的，是在不到一年的时间里，通过产品革命性方面的势头，以及我们作为公司的每一分营销力量，我们能够在那块岩石上炸出一条第三条通道，形成一条第三条河流，第三个标准。在我看来，今天只有两家公司能够做到这一点，Apple 和 IBM。也许这太可惜了，但现在做到这一点确实是一项巨大的努力，我认为 Apple 或 IBM 在接下来的三四年内都不会做到。到八十年代末，我们可能会看到一些新事物。

The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer.

开发将集中在使产品越来越便携、网络化、推出激光打印机、推出共享数据库、增强通信能力，也许还会合并电话和个人电脑。

You have a lot riding on this one. Some people have said that Macintosh will make or break Apple. After Lisa and Apple III, Apple stock plummeted and the industry speculated that Apple might not survive.

你在这件事上投入了很多。有些人说，Macintosh 将决定苹果的成败。在 Lisa 和 Apple III 之后，苹果的股票暴跌，业界猜测苹果可能无法生存。

Yeah, we felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. We knew that we had to pull the rabbit out of the hat with Macintosh, or else we’d never realize the dreams we had for either the products or the company.

是的，我们感受到了肩上的重担。我们知道必须在 Macintosh 上施展魔法，否则我们将永远无法实现对产品或公司的梦想。

No, no, no. In fact, 1983, when all these predictions were being made, was a phenomenally successful year for Apple. We virtually doubled in size in 1983. We went from $583,000,000 in 1982 to something like $980,000,000 in sales. It was almost all Apple II-related. It just didn’t live up to our expectations. If Macintosh weren’t a success, we probably would have stayed at something like a billion dollars a year, selling Apple IIs and versions of it.

不，不，不。事实上，1983 年，当所有这些预测被提出时，苹果公司是一个极其成功的年份。我们在 1983 年几乎翻了一番。我们从 1982 年的 5.83 亿美元增长到大约 9.8 亿美元的销售额。几乎全部与 Apple II 相关。它只是没有达到我们的预期。如果 Macintosh 没有成功，我们可能会保持在每年大约十亿美元的水平，销售 Apple II 及其版本。

IBM was coming on very, very strong, and the momentum was switching to IBM. The software developers were moving to IBM. The dealers were talking more and more of IBM. It became clear to all of us who worked on Macintosh that it was just gonna blow the socks off the industry, that it was going to redefine the industry. And that’s exactly what it had to do. If Macintosh hadn’t been successful, then I should have just thrown in the towel, because my vision of the whole industry would have been totally wrong.

IBM 的势头非常强劲，市场的重心正在转向 IBM。软件开发者们纷纷转向 IBM。经销商们越来越多地谈论 IBM。对于我们这些在 Macintosh 上工作的人来说，显而易见的是，它将彻底改变整个行业，重新定义这个行业。这正是它必须做到的。如果 Macintosh 没有成功，那么我就应该放弃，因为我对整个行业的愿景将完全错误。

Infinite, incalculable amounts. I think if the III had been more successful, IBM would have had a much harder time entering the market place. But that’s life. I think we emerged from that experience much stronger.

无限，无法计算的数量。我认为如果 III 更成功，IBM 进入市场会更加困难。但这就是生活。我认为我们从那次经历中变得更强大。

First of all, it was too expensive—about ten grand. We had gotten Fortune 500-itis, trying to sell to those huge corporations, when our roots were selling to people. There were other problems: late shipping; the software didn’t come together in the end as well as we hoped and we lost a lot of momentum. And IBM’s coming on very strong, coupled with our being about six months late, coupled with the price’s being too high, plus another strategic mistake we made—deciding to sell Lisa only through about 150 dealers, which was absolutely foolish on our part—meant it was a very costly mistake. We decided to hire people we thought were marketing and management experts. Not a bad idea, but unfortunately, this was such a new business that the things the so-called professionals knew were almost detriments to their success in this new way of looking at business.

首先，这太贵了——大约一万美元。我们得了财富 500 强病，试图向那些大型企业销售，而我们的根本是向个人销售。还有其他问题：发货延迟；软件最终没有达到我们希望的效果，我们失去了很多动力。而且 IBM 的势头很强，加上我们晚了大约六个月，加上价格太高，再加上我们犯的另一个战略错误——决定只通过大约 150 个经销商销售 Lisa，这绝对是我们愚蠢的决定——这意味着这是一个非常昂贵的错误。我们决定雇佣我们认为是市场营销和管理专家的人。这不是个坏主意，但不幸的是，这是一项如此新的业务，以至于所谓的专业人士所知道的东西几乎对他们在这种新商业视角下的成功构成了障碍。

Remember, we were 23, 24 and 25 years old. We had never done any of this before, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

记住，我们当时 23、24 和 25 岁。我们之前从未做过这些，所以这似乎是个好主意。

We tried never to have one person make all the decisions. There were three people running the company at that time: Mike Scott, Mike Markkula and myself. Now it’s John Sculley [Apple's president] and myself. In the early days, if there was a disagreement, I would generally defer my judgment to some of the other people who had more experience than I had. In many cases, they were right. In some important cases, if we had gone my way, we would have done better.

我们尽量避免让一个人做所有的决定。当时公司有三个人在管理：迈克·斯科特、迈克·马克库拉和我自己。现在是约翰·斯卡利（苹果公司的总裁）和我自己。在早期，如果有分歧，我通常会将我的判断推迟给一些比我更有经验的人。在许多情况下，他们是对的。在一些重要的情况下，如果我们按照我的方式行事，我们会做得更好。

After setting up the framework for the concepts and finding the key people and sort of setting the technical directions, Scotty decided I didn’t have the experience to run the thing. It hurt a lot. There’s no getting around it.

在为这些概念建立框架、找到关键人物并设定技术方向后，斯科特决定我没有足够的经验来管理这个项目。这让我很受伤。无可避免。

There was a bit of that, I guess, but the thing that was harder for me was that they hired a lot of people in the Lisa group who didn’t share the vision we originally had. There was a big conflict in the Lisa group between the people who wanted, in essence, to build something like Macintosh and the people hired from Hewlett-Packard and other companies who brought with them a perspective of larger machines, corporate sales. I just decided that I was going to go off and do that myself with a small group, sort of go back to the garage, to design the Macintosh. They didn’t take us very seriously. I think Scotty was just sort of humoring me.

我想确实有一点这样的情况，但对我来说更困难的是，他们在 Lisa 团队中雇佣了很多不认同我们最初愿景的人。Lisa 团队内部存在着一个巨大的冲突，一方面是那些本质上想要构建类似 Macintosh 的人，另一方面是从惠普和其他公司招募来的员工，他们带来了对大型机器和企业销售的看法。我决定自己带着一个小团队去做这件事，回到车库，设计 Macintosh。他们并没有很认真地对待我们。我觉得斯科特只是有点在迁就我。

You can never resent your kid.

你永远不能怨恨你的孩子。

I wouldn’t feel resentment. I’d feel great sorrow about it and I’d be frustrated, which I was. But I got the best people who were at Apple, because I thought that if we didn’t do that, we’d be in real trouble. Of course, it was those people who came up with Macintosh. [Shrugs] Look at Mac.

我不会感到怨恨。我会对此感到非常悲伤，并且会感到沮丧，确实是这样。但我得到了在苹果公司最优秀的人，因为我认为如果我们不这样做，我们会陷入真正的麻烦。当然，正是这些人创造了 Macintosh。[耸肩] 看看 Mac。

It’s true: We expressed very high hopes for Lisa and we were wrong. The hardest thing for us was that we knew Macintosh was coming, and Macintosh seemed to overcome every possible objection to Lisa. As a company, we would be getting back to our roots—selling computers to people, not corporations. We went off and built the most insanely great computer in the world.

这是真的：我们对 Lisa 寄予了很高的期望，但我们错了。对我们来说最困难的是，我们知道 Macintosh 即将推出，而 Macintosh 似乎克服了对 Lisa 的所有可能反对意见。作为一家公司，我们将回归我们的根本——向个人而非企业销售计算机。我们出发去打造世界上最疯狂伟大的计算机。

Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But, yeah, the people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.

实际上，创造一个极其出色的产品与制作产品的过程有很大关系，包括你如何学习新事物、采纳新想法以及抛弃旧想法。不过，是的，制作 Mac 的人有点走在前沿。

Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

让我把它和 IBM 进行比较。为什么 Mac 团队能生产出 Mac，而 IBM 的人却生产了 PCjr？我们认为 Mac 会卖出数以亿计，但我们并不是为了别人而制造 Mac。我们是为了自己而制造的。我们是那群将要判断它是否伟大的人。我们不会去做市场调研。我们只想制造出我们能制造的最好的东西。当你是一名木匠在制作一个漂亮的抽屉柜时，你不会在背面使用一块胶合板，即使它面朝墙壁，没人会看到。你会知道它在那里，所以你会在背面使用一块漂亮的木头。为了让你晚上睡得安稳，审美和质量必须贯穿始终。

If they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the PCjr. It seems clear to me that they were designing that on the basis of market research for a specific market segment, for a specific demographic type of customer, and they hoped that if they built this, lots of people would buy them and they’d make lots of money. Those are different motivations. The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.

如果他们这样做了，就不会推出 PCjr。对我来说，他们显然是基于市场调研为特定市场细分、特定人口类型的客户设计的，他们希望如果他们制造这个，很多人会购买，从而赚很多钱。这些是不同的动机。Mac 团队的人想要打造有史以来最伟大的计算机。

It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.

对于任何新的、革命性的事物来说，情况往往都是如此。随着年龄的增长，人们会陷入固定的思维模式。我们的思维就像是电化学计算机。你的思想构建了像脚手架一样的模式在你的大脑中。你实际上是在刻蚀化学模式。在大多数情况下，人们会陷入这些模式中，就像唱片上的凹槽一样，他们永远无法摆脱。很少有人能够刻蚀出不同于特定看待事物方式、特定质疑事物方式的凹槽。在30岁或40岁的艺术家中，能够真正贡献出令人惊叹的东西的人是罕见的。当然，也有一些人天生好奇，永远对生活充满敬畏，像永远的小孩子一样，但他们是罕见的。

I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers. I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone’s list. Where are they now? They would be on no one’s list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies. You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this. Anyway, one of our biggest challenges, and the one I think John Sculley and I should be judged on in five to ten years, is making Apple an incredibly great ten- or 20-billion-dollar company. Will it still have the spirit it does today? We’re charting new territory. There are no models that we can look to for our high growth, for some of the new management concepts we have. So we’re having to find our own way.

我确实觉得我们对社会的影响还有另一种方式，除了我们的电脑。我认为苹果有机会成为八十年代末和九十年代初财富 500 强公司的典范。十到十五年前，如果你让人们列出美国五家最令人兴奋的公司，宝丽来和施乐一定会在每个人的名单上。它们现在在哪里？今天没有人会把它们列入名单。发生了什么？公司在成长为数十亿美元的实体时，某种程度上失去了愿景。他们在管理公司的人和实际工作的人之间插入了许多中层管理层。他们对产品不再有内在的感觉或热情。那些真正关心的创意人员必须说服五层管理层去做他们知道是正确的事情。在大多数公司中，发生的情况是，你无法在不鼓励个人成就的工作环境中留住优秀人才。优秀的人才离开，最终你只剩下平庸。我知道，因为这就是苹果的建立方式。苹果是一家艾利斯岛公司。苹果是由其他公司的难民建立的。 这些是那些在其他公司曾经是麻烦制造者的极其优秀的个人贡献者。你知道，埃德温·兰德博士就是一个麻烦制造者。他从哈佛辍学，创办了宝丽来。他不仅是我们这个时代伟大的发明家之一，更重要的是，他看到了艺术、科学和商业的交汇，并建立了一个反映这一点的组织。宝丽来在某些年份做到了这一点，但最终，兰德博士，这位杰出的麻烦制造者，被要求离开自己的公司——这是我听过的最愚蠢的事情之一。因此，75 岁的兰德去花余生从事纯科学，试图破解色彩视觉的密码。这个人是国家的宝藏。我不明白为什么像这样的人不能被视为榜样：这才是最不可思议的事情——不是宇航员，不是足球运动员——而是这个。无论如何，我们面临的最大挑战之一，我认为约翰·斯卡利和我在五到十年后应该被评判的，就是让苹果成为一个极其伟大的十亿或二十亿美元的公司。它是否仍然会拥有今天的精神？我们正在开辟新领域。 我们没有可以借鉴的模型来应对我们的高速增长，以及一些新的管理理念。因此，我们必须找到自己的道路。

The way it’s going to work out is that in our business, in order to continue to be one of the major contributors, we’re going to have to be a ten-billion-dollar company. That growth is required for us to keep up with the competition. Our concern is how we become that, rather than the dollar goal, which is meaningless to us. At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person—a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future. Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now. And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

在我们的业务中，为了继续成为主要贡献者之一，我们必须成为一家价值十亿美元的公司。这种增长是我们跟上竞争所必需的。我们关心的是如何实现这一目标，而不是毫无意义的美元目标。在苹果，员工们每天工作 18 小时。我们吸引的是一种不同类型的人——那些不想等五年或十年才让别人冒险的人。那些真正想要挑战自我并在宇宙中留下印记的人。我们意识到我们正在做一些重要的事情。我们处在这一切的开端，并能够塑造它的发展方向。这里的每个人都感觉到，现在正是我们影响未来的时刻。大多数时候，我们只是接受现成的东西。你我都没有制作我们穿的衣服；我们不制作或种植我们吃的食物；我们使用的是其他人开发的语言；我们使用的是另一个社会的数学。我们很少有机会将一些东西回馈给这个池子。我认为我们现在有这个机会。 我们不知道这将引向何方。我们只知道这里有比我们任何人都要更大的东西。

Yes. The business market has several sectors. Rather than just thinking of the Fortune 500, which is where IBM is strongest, I like to think of the Fortune 5,000,000 or 14,000,000. There are 14,000,000 small businesses in this country. I think that the vast group of people who need to be computerized includes that large number of medium and small businesses. We’re going to try to be able to bring some meaningful solutions to them in 1985.

是的。商业市场有几个部门。与其只考虑财富 500 强（IBM 在其中最强），我更喜欢考虑财富 5,000,000 或 14,000,000。在这个国家有 14,000,000 家小企业。我认为需要实现计算机化的广大人群包括大量的中小企业。我们将在 1985 年努力为他们提供一些有意义的解决方案。

Our approach is to think of them not as businesses but as collections of people. We want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don’t just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We’re seeing five-page memos get compressed to one-page memos because we can use a picture to express the key concept. We’re seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication. And it’s more fun. There’s always been this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of a sudden have to become very dull and boring when they come to work. It’s simply not true. If we can inject that liberal-arts spirit into the very serious realm of business, I think it will be a worthwhile contribution. We can’t even conceive of how far it will go.

我们的方法是将他们视为人群的集合，而不是企业。我们希望从根本上改变人们的工作方式。我们不仅希望帮助他们更快地进行文字处理或更快地加数字。我们希望改变他们之间的沟通方式。我们看到五页的备忘录被压缩成一页，因为我们可以用图片来表达关键概念。我们看到纸张的使用减少，沟通的质量提高。而且这更有趣。一直以来都有一个神话，那些在家里非常整洁、有趣的人在工作时突然变得非常乏味和无聊。这根本不是真的。如果我们能将那种人文学科的精神注入到严肃的商业领域，我认为这将是一个有价值的贡献。我们甚至无法想象它将走多远。

But in the business market, you’re fighting the IBM name as much as anything. People associate IBM with stability and efficiency. The new entry in the computer field, A.T.&T., has that one up on you, too. Apple is a relatively young and untested company, particularly in the eyes of corporations that might be customers.

但在商业市场上，你与 IBM 的名声同样在竞争。人们将 IBM 与稳定性和效率联系在一起。新进入计算机领域的 A.T.&T.在这一点上也优于你。苹果是一家相对年轻且未经考验的公司，尤其是在可能成为客户的企业眼中。

It’s Macintosh’s job to really penetrate the business market place. IBM focuses on the top down, the mainframe centric approach to selling in businesses. If we are going to be successful, we’ve got to approach this from a grass-roots point of view. To use networking as an example, rather than focusing on wiring up whole companies, as IBM is doing, we’re going to focus on the phenomenon of the small work group.

麦金塔的任务是深入商业市场。IBM 专注于自上而下的、以大型机为中心的销售方式。如果我们想要成功，就必须从草根的角度来处理这个问题。以网络为例，我们不会像 IBM 那样专注于为整个公司布线，而是将重点放在小型工作组的现象上。

That’s simply untrue. Insisting that we need one standard now is like saying that they needed one standard for automobiles in 1920. There would have been no innovations such as the automatic transmission, power steering and independent suspension if they believed that. The last thing we want to do is freeze technology. With computers, Macintosh is revolutionary. There is no question that Macintosh’s technology is superior to IBM’s. There is a clear need for an alternative to IBM.

这完全不真实。坚持认为我们现在需要一个标准就像是在说 1920 年他们需要一个汽车标准。如果他们相信这一点，就不会有自动变速器、动力转向和独立悬挂等创新。我们最不想做的就是冻结技术。在计算机领域，Macintosh 是革命性的。毫无疑问，Macintosh 的技术优于 IBM 的技术。显然需要一个 IBM 的替代品。

It wasn’t that we had to express our manhood by being different, no.

这并不是说我们必须通过与众不同来表达我们的男子气概，不。

The main thing is very simply that the technology we developed is superior. It could not be this good if we became compatible with IBM. Of course, it’s true that we don’t want IBM to dominate this industry. A lot of people thought we were nuts for not being IBM-compatible, for not living under IBM’s umbrella. There were two key reasons we chose to bet our company on not doing that: The first was that we thought—and I think as history is unfolding, we’re being proved correct—that IBM would fold its umbrella on the companies making compatible computers and absolutely crush them. Second and more important, we did not go IBM-compatible because of the product vision that drives this company. We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world. What we want to do at Apple is make computers into appliances and get them to tens of millions of people. That’s simply what we want to do. And we couldn’t do that with the current IBM-generation type of technology. So we had to do something different. That’s why we came up with the Macintosh.

主要的事情非常简单，我们开发的技术是优越的。如果我们与 IBM 兼容，就不可能这么好。当然，我们确实不希望 IBM 主导这个行业。很多人认为我们不与 IBM 兼容、不在 IBM 的保护伞下是疯了。我们选择将公司押注于不这样做有两个关键原因：第一，我们认为——我认为随着历史的发展，我们的观点得到了证明——IBM 会收起它的保护伞，彻底压垮那些制造兼容计算机的公司。第二，更重要的是，我们之所以不与 IBM 兼容，是因为推动这家公司发展的产品愿景。我们认为计算机是人类迄今为止最杰出的工具，而我们认为人们本质上是工具的使用者。因此，如果我们能将大量计算机带给很多人，这将对世界产生一些质的变化。我们在苹果想要做的是将计算机变成家电，并让它们进入数千万人的手中。这就是我们想要做的。而我们无法用当前 IBM 一代的技术做到这一点。 所以我们不得不做一些不同的事情。这就是我们提出 Macintosh 的原因。

We’ve never worried about numbers. In the market place, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. IBM is trying to focus the spotlight on service, support, security, mainframes and motherhood. Now, Apple’s key observation three years ago was that when you’re shipping 10,000,000 computers a year, even IBM does not have enough mothers to ship one with every computer. So you’ve got to build motherhood into the computer. And that’s a big part of what Macintosh is all about. All these things show that it really is coming down to just Apple and IBM. If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.

我们从未担心数字。在市场上，苹果试图将焦点放在产品上，因为产品确实能带来不同。IBM 则试图将焦点放在服务、支持、安全、主机和母版上。三年前，苹果的关键观察是，当你每年出货 10,000,000 台电脑时，即使是 IBM 也没有足够的母版来为每台电脑出货一台。因此，你必须将母版融入电脑中。这是 Macintosh 的一个重要部分。所有这些事情表明，实际上只剩下苹果和 IBM。如果出于某种原因，我们犯了一些巨大的错误，IBM 获胜，我个人的感觉是，我们将进入大约 20 年的计算机黑暗时代。一旦 IBM 控制了一个市场领域，他们几乎总是会停止创新。他们阻止创新的发生。

Look at this example: Frito-Lay is a very interesting company. They call on more than half a million accounts a week. There’s a Frito-Lay rack in each store, and the chips are all there, and every store’s got the identical rack and the big ones have multiples. For Frito-Lay, the biggest problem is stale product—bad chips, so to speak. For Frito-Lay’s service, they’ve got, like, 10,000 guys who run around and take out the stale product and replace it with good product. They talk to the manager of that department and they make sure everything’s fine. Because of that service and support, they now have more than an 80 percent share of every segment of chips that they’re in. Nobody else can break into that. As long as they keep doing what they do well, nobody else can get 80 percent of the market share, because they can’t get the sales and support staff. They can’t get it because they can’t afford it. They can’t afford it because they don’t have 80 percent of the market share. It’s catch-22. Nobody will ever be able to break into their franchise. Frito-Lay doesn’t have to innovate very much. They just watch all the little chip companies come out with something new, study it for a year, and a year or two years later they come out with their own, service and support it to death, and they’ve got 80 percent of the market share of the new product a year later. IBM is playing exactly the same game. If you look at the mainframe market place, there’s been virtually zero innovation since IBM got dominant control of that market place 15 years ago. They are going to do the same thing in every other sector of the computer market place if they can get away with it. The IBM PC fundamentally brought no new technology to the industry at all. It was just repackaging and slight extension of Apple II technology, and they want it all. They absolutely want it all. This market place is coming down to the two of us, whether we like it or not. I don’t particularly like it, but it’s coming down to Apple and IBM.

看看这个例子：Frito-Lay 是一家非常有趣的公司。他们每周拜访超过五十万个客户。每个商店都有一个 Frito-Lay 的货架，薯片都在上面，每个商店的货架都是一样的，大型商店还有多个。对于 Frito-Lay 来说，最大的问题是过期产品——可以说是坏薯片。为了提供服务，他们有大约 10,000 名员工四处奔走，取出过期产品并用好的产品替换。他们与该部门的经理沟通，确保一切正常。正因为有这样的服务和支持，他们现在在每个薯片细分市场中拥有超过 80% 的市场份额。没有其他人能够打破这一局面。只要他们继续做好自己擅长的事情，没有其他人能够获得 80% 的市场份额，因为他们无法获得销售和支持人员。他们无法获得这些，因为他们负担不起。负担不起是因为他们没有 80% 的市场份额。这是一个困境。没有人能够打破他们的特许经营。Frito-Lay 不需要进行太多创新。 他们只是观察所有的小型公司推出新产品，研究一年，然后在一年或两年后推出自己的产品，提供服务并支持到死，一年后他们就占据了新产品 80%的市场份额。IBM 正在玩完全相同的游戏。如果你看看大型机市场，自从 IBM 15 年前主导了这个市场以来，几乎没有任何创新。如果他们能逃脱责任，他们将在计算机市场的其他所有领域做同样的事情。IBM PC 从根本上没有为行业带来任何新技术。它只是对 Apple II 技术的重新包装和轻微扩展，他们想要一切。他们绝对想要一切。这个市场正在归结为我们两个人，无论我们喜欢与否。我并不特别喜欢，但这正在归结为苹果和 IBM。

In terms of supplying the computer itself, it’s coming down to Apple and IBM. And I don’t think there are going to be a lot of third- and fourth-place companies, much less sixth- or seventh-place companies. Most of the new, innovative companies are focusing on the software. I think there will be lots of innovation in the areas of software but not in hardware.

在计算机本身的供应方面，最终只剩下苹果和 IBM。我认为不会有很多第三或第四名的公司，更不用说第六或第七名的公司了。大多数新的创新公司都专注于软件。我认为在软件领域会有很多创新，但在硬件方面则不会。

I think that the scale of the business has gotten large enough so that it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to successfully launch anything new.

我认为业务的规模已经足够大，以至于任何人都很难成功推出任何新东西。

No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come from us. It’s the only way we can compete with them. If we go fast enough, they can’t keep up.

不，我恐怕在计算机方面不行。这给苹果带来了责任，因为如果这个行业要有创新，那就来自我们。这是我们与他们竞争的唯一方式。如果我们足够快，他们就跟不上。

There may be some imitators left in the $100,000,000-to-$200,000,000 range, but being a $200,000,000 company is going to mean you are struggling for your life, and that’s not really a position from which to innovate. Not only do I think IBM will do away with its imitators by providing software they can’t provide, I think eventually it will come up with a new standard that won’t even be compatible with what it’s making now—because it is to limiting.

可能在$100,000,000 到$200,000,000 的范围内还有一些模仿者，但成为一家价值$200,000,000 的公司意味着你正在为生存而挣扎，这并不是一个可以创新的位置。我不仅认为 IBM 会通过提供他们无法提供的软件来消灭这些模仿者，我还认为最终它会提出一个新的标准，甚至与它现在所生产的东西不兼容——因为这太有限了。

That’s right. Mac is altogether new. We knew that we could reach the early innovators with current-generation technology—Apple II, IBM PC—because they’d stay up all night learning how to use their computer. But we’d never reach the majority of people. If we were really going to get computers to tens of millions of people, we needed a technology that would make the thing radically easier to use and more powerful at the same time, so we had to make a break. We just had to do it. We wanted to make sure it was great, because it may be the last chance that any of us get to make a clean break. And I’m very happy with the way Macintosh turned out. It will prove a really solid foundation for the next ten years.

没错。Mac 完全是新的。我们知道，我们可以通过当前一代技术——Apple II、IBM PC——接触到早期的创新者，因为他们会熬夜学习如何使用他们的电脑。但我们永远无法接触到大多数人。如果我们真的想让数千万的人使用电脑，我们需要一种技术，使得使用变得极其简单，同时又更强大，因此我们必须做出突破。我们必须这样做。我们想确保它是伟大的，因为这可能是我们任何人最后一次有机会做出彻底的改变。我对 Macintosh 的表现非常满意。它将为未来十年奠定一个非常坚实的基础。

They encouraged my interests. My father was a machinist, and he was a sort of genius with his hands. He can fix anything and make it work and take any mechanical thing apart and get it back together. That was my first glimpse of it. I started to gravitate more toward electronics, and he used to get me things I could take apart and put back together. He was transferred to Palo Alto when I was five. That’s how we ended up in the Valley.

他们鼓励我的兴趣。我的父亲是一名机械师，他在动手能力上有种天才。他能修理任何东西，让它运转，并把任何机械物品拆开再组装起来。这是我第一次接触到这些。我开始更倾向于电子产品，他常常给我一些可以拆解和重新组装的东西。当我五岁时，他被调到帕洛阿尔托。这就是我们最终来到硅谷的原因。

You don’t ever really know, do you?

你永远也不知道，对吧？

I think it’s quite a natural curiosity for adopted people to want to understand where certain traits come from. But I’m mostly an environmentalist. I think the way you are raised and your values and most of your world view come from the experiences you had as you grew up. But some things aren’t accounted for that way. I think it’s quite natural to have a curiosity about it. And I did.

我认为被收养的人想要了解某些特征来自哪里是很自然的好奇心。但我主要是个环境主义者。我认为你的成长方式、价值观以及大部分世界观都来自于你成长过程中经历的事情。但有些事情并不是这样解释的。我认为对这些事情产生好奇是很自然的。我也是这样。

That’s one area I really don’t want to talk about.

那是我真的不想谈论的一个领域。

It was the suburbs. It was like most suburbs in the U.S.: I grew up on a block with lots of kids. My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs. Things changed in the fourth grade, though. One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. She got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned in any year in school. They wanted to put me in high school after that year, but my parents very wisely wouldn’t let them.

那是郊区。它就像美国大多数郊区一样：我在一个有很多孩子的街区长大。我的母亲在我上学之前就教我阅读，所以我在学校里感到非常无聊，变成了一个小恶霸。你应该看看我们三年级的时候。我们基本上把老师搞得一团糟。我们会在教室里放蛇，还会引爆炸弹。不过，四年级的时候情况发生了变化。我的生活中有一个圣人，就是这个名叫伊莫金·希尔的女人，她是一位教授这个高级班的四年级老师。她大约一个月后就了解了我的整个情况，并激发了我对学习的热情。那一年我学到的东西比我在学校的任何一年都要多。那年之后，他们想让我上高中，但我父母非常明智地不让他们这么做。

The Valley is positioned strategically between two great universities, Berkeley and Stanford. Both of those universities attract not only lots of students but very good students and ones from all over the United States. They come here and fall in love with the area and they stay here. So there is a constant influx of new, bright human resources. Before World War Two, two Stanford graduates named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard created a very innovative electronics company—Hewlett-Packard. Then the transistor was invented in 1948 by Bell Telephone Laboratories. One of the three coinventors of the transistor, William Shockley, decided to return to his home town of Palo Alto to start a little company called Shockley Labs or something. He brought with him about a dozen of the best and brightest physicists and chemists of his day. Little by little, people started breaking off and forming competitive companies, like those flowers or weeds that scatter seeds in hundreds of directions when you blow on them. And that’s why the Valley is here today.

硅谷战略性地位于两所著名大学之间，伯克利和斯坦福。这两所大学不仅吸引了大量学生，还吸引了来自美国各地的优秀学生。他们来到这里，爱上这个地区，并选择留在这里。因此，新的优秀人力资源源源不断地涌入。第二次世界大战前，两位斯坦福毕业生比尔·休利特和戴夫·帕卡德创办了一家非常创新的电子公司——惠普。然后，1948 年，贝尔电话实验室发明了晶体管。晶体管的三位共同发明人之一威廉·肖克利决定回到他的家乡帕洛阿尔托，创办一家名为肖克利实验室的小公司。他带来了大约十二位当时最优秀的物理学家和化学家。渐渐地，人们开始分开，成立竞争公司，就像那些在你吹气时向四面八方散播种子的花朵或杂草。这就是硅谷今天存在的原因。

A neighbor down the block named Larry Lang was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. He spent a lot of time with me, teaching me stuff. The first computer I ever saw was at Hewlett-Packard. They used to invite maybe ten of us down every Tuesday night and give us lectures and let us work with a computer. I was maybe 12 the first time. I remember the night. They showed us one of their new desktop computers and let us play on it. I wanted one badly.

一个名叫拉里·朗的邻居是惠普的工程师。他花了很多时间和我在一起，教我东西。我见到的第一台电脑是在惠普。他们每周二晚上会邀请大约十个人来，给我们讲座，让我们使用电脑。我第一次去的时候大约 12 岁。我记得那天晚上。他们给我们展示了一台新款的台式电脑，让我们玩。我非常想要一台。

It wasn’t anything like that. I just thought they were neat. I just wanted to mess around with one.

这并不是那样。我只是觉得它们很酷。我只是想玩玩其中一个。

When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to build something and I needed some parts, so I picked up the phone and called Bill Hewlett—he was listed in the Palo Alto phone book. He answered the phone and he was real nice. He chatted with me for, like, 20 minutes. He didn’t know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working at Hewlett-Packard on the line, assembling frequency counters. Assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It didn’t matter; I was in heaven. I remember my first day, expressing my complete enthusiasm and bliss at being at Hewlett-Packard for the summer to my supervisor, a guy named Chris, telling him that my favorite thing in the whole world was electronics. I asked him what his favorite thing to do was and he looked at me and said, “To fuck!” [Laughs] I learned a lot that summer.

当我 12 或 13 岁时，我想要建造一些东西，需要一些零件，于是我拿起电话，拨打了比尔·休利特的电话——他在帕洛阿尔托的电话簿上有列出。他接了电话，非常友好。他和我聊了大约 20 分钟。他根本不认识我，但最后给了我一些零件，并在那个夏天帮我找了一份在惠普的工作，负责组装频率计。组装这个词可能太强烈了。我只是在拧螺丝。没关系；我简直是在天堂。我记得我的第一天，向我的主管克里斯表达了我对在惠普度过这个夏天的完全热情和快乐，告诉他我最喜欢的事情就是电子。我问他最喜欢做什么，他看着我说：“操！”[笑] 那个夏天我学到了很多。

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.

我在 13 岁时在一个朋友的车库里遇见了沃兹。他大约 18 岁。那时他是我遇到的第一个电子知识比我多的人。我们成为了好朋友，因为我们对计算机有共同的兴趣，并且有幽默感。我们一起搞了各种恶作剧。

[Grins] Normal stuff. Like making a huge flag with a giant one of these on it [gives the finger]. The idea was that we would unfurl it in the middle of a school graduation. Then there was the time Wozniak made something that looked and sounded like a bomb and took it to the school cafeteria. We also went into the blue-box business together.

[微笑] 正常的事情。比如做一个巨大的旗帜，上面有一个这样的图案 [竖中指]。我们的想法是在学校毕业典礼中展开它。还有一次，沃兹尼亚克做了一个看起来和听起来像炸弹的东西，带到了学校食堂。我们还一起进入了蓝盒子业务。

Mm-hm. The famous story about the boxes is when Woz called the Vatican and told them he was Henry Kissinger. They had someone going to wake the Pope up in the middle of the night before they figured out it wasn’t really Kissinger.

嗯。关于那些盒子的著名故事是，当沃兹打电话给梵蒂冈，自称是亨利·基辛格时。他们有一个人准备在半夜叫醒教皇，直到他们发现这并不是真正的基辛格。

Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.

我几次被学校开除。

I wasn’t completely in any one world for too long. There was so much else going on. Between my sophomore and junior years, I got stoned for the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and all that classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back as a junior taking creative-writing classes. By the time I was a senior, I’d gotten permission to spend about half my time at Stanford, taking classes.

我在任何一个世界里都没有待太久。还有太多其他事情发生。在我的大二和大三之间，我第一次吸毒；我发现了莎士比亚、迪伦·托马斯和所有那些经典作品。我读了《白鲸》，然后在大三时回去上创意写作课。到我大四时，我已经获得了在斯坦福大学花大约一半时间上课的许可。

[Laughs] Yes, but not just with computers. I think Woz was in a world that nobody understood. No one shared his interests, and he was a little ahead of his time. It was very lonely for him. He’s driven from inner sights rather than external expectations of him, so he survived OK. Woz and I are different in most ways, but there are some ways in which we’re the same, and we’re very close in those ways. We’re sort of like two planets in their own orbits that every so often intersect. It wasn’t just computers, either. Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities. Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time. When I went to college at Reed, in Oregon, there was a constant flow of people stopping by, from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert to Gary Snyder. There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was a time when every college student in this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet—there were about ten books. You’d be hard pressed to find those books on too many college campuses today. I’m not saying it’s better or worse; it’s just different—very different. In Search of Excellence [the book about business practices] has taken the place of Be Here Now.

[笑] 是的，但不仅仅是与计算机有关。我认为沃兹身处一个无人理解的世界。没有人分享他的兴趣，他有点超前于时代。这让他感到非常孤独。他的动力来自内心的视角，而不是外界对他的期望，因此他过得还不错。沃兹和我在大多数方面都不同，但在某些方面我们是相似的，我们在这些方面非常亲近。我们就像两个各自运行轨道的行星，偶尔会相交。也不仅仅是计算机。沃兹和我非常喜欢鲍勃·迪伦的诗歌，我们花了很多时间思考这些东西。这是加利福尼亚。你可以从斯坦福大学新鲜获得 LSD。你可以和女朋友在海滩上过夜。加利福尼亚有一种实验精神和开放的感觉——对新可能性的开放。除了迪伦，我对东方神秘主义也很感兴趣，这大约在同一时间涌现。当我在俄勒冈州的里德学院上大学时，常常有来自蒂莫西·利里和理查德·阿尔珀特到加里·斯奈德的人们来访。关于生命真相的知识探讨源源不断。 那是一个这个国家的每个大学生都在阅读《活在当下》和《小星球饮食》的时代——大约有十本书。今天你很难在太多大学校园里找到这些书。我并不是说这更好或更糟；这只是不同——非常不同。《追求卓越》（关于商业实践的书）已经取代了《活在当下》。

The whole period had a huge influence. As it was clear that the Sixties were over, it was also clear that a lot of the people who had gone through the Sixties ended up not really accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, and because they had thrown their discipline to the wind, they didn’t have much to fall back on. Many of my friends have ended up ingrained with the idealism of that period but also with a certain practicality, a cautiousness about ending up working behind the counter in a natural-food store when they are 45, which is what they saw happen to some of their older friends. It’s not that that is bad in and of itself, but it’s bad if that’s not what you really wanted to do.

整个时期产生了巨大的影响。随着六十年代的结束，显然许多经历过六十年代的人并没有真正实现他们所设定的目标，因为他们抛弃了自己的纪律，因此没有太多可以依靠的东西。我的许多朋友深受那个时期理想主义的影响，但也带着某种实用主义，对在 45 岁时在自然食品店柜台后工作的谨慎态度，这正是他们看到一些年长朋友的遭遇。这本身并没有什么不好，但如果这不是你真正想做的，那就不好了。

Right. I decided I wanted to travel, but I was lacking the necessary funds. I came back down to get a job. I was looking in the paper and there was this ad that said, yes, “Have fun and make money.” I called. It was Atari. I had never had a job before other than the one when I was a kid. By some stroke of luck, they called me up the next day and hired me.

好的。我决定想要旅行，但我缺乏必要的资金。我回去找工作。我在报纸上看到了一个广告，上面写着，“玩得开心，赚钱。”我打了电话。那是雅达利。我之前除了小时候的工作外，从未有过其他工作。出于某种运气，他们第二天就给我打了电话，雇用了我。

I was, like, employee number 40. It was a very small company. They had made Pong and two other games. My first job was helping a guy named Don work on a basketball game, which was a disaster. There was this basketball game, and somebody was working on a hockey game. They were trying to model all their games after simple field sports at that time, because Pong was such a success.

我当时是员工编号 40。这是一家非常小的公司。他们制作了乒乓球和另外两个游戏。我第一份工作是帮助一个叫唐的人开发一款篮球游戏，这是一场灾难。那款篮球游戏，还有一个人在开发冰球游戏。他们当时试图将所有游戏都模仿简单的场地运动，因为乒乓球取得了巨大的成功。

Atari had shipped a bunch of games to Europe and they had some engineering defects in them, and I figured out how to fix them, but it was necessary for somebody to go over there and actually do the fixing. I volunteered to go and asked to take a leave of absence when I was there. They let me do it. I ended up in Switzerland and moved from Zurich to New Delhi. I spent some time in India.

雅达利向欧洲发运了一些游戏，但其中存在一些工程缺陷，我找到了修复的方法，但需要有人去那里实际进行修复。我自愿去，并请求在那时请假。他们让我这样做。我最终到了瑞士，从苏黎世搬到了新德里。我在印度待了一段时间。

That’s not quite the way it happened. I was walking around in the Himalayas and I stumbled onto this thing that turned out to be a religious festival. There was a baba, a holy man, who was the holy man of this particular festival, with his large group of followers. I could smell good food. I hadn’t been fortunate enough to smell good food for a long time, so I wandered up to pay my respects and eat some lunch. For some reason, this baba, upon seeing me sitting there eating, immediately walked over to me and sat down and burst out laughing. He didn’t speak much English and I spoke a little Hindi, but he tried to carry on a conversation and he was just rolling on the ground with laughter. Then he grabbed my arm and took me up this mountain trail. It was a little funny, because here were hundreds of Indians who had traveled for thousands of miles to hang out with this guy for ten seconds and I stumble in for something to eat and he’s dragging me up this mountain path. We get to the top of this mountain half an hour later and there’s this little well and pond at the top of this mountain, and he dunks my head in the water and pulls out a razor from his pocket and starts to shave my head. I’m completely stunned. I’m 19 years old, in a foreign country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head atop this mountain peak. I’m still not sure why he did it.

这并不是事情发生的方式。我在喜马拉雅山走着，偶然发现了一个宗教节日。那里有一个圣人，负责这个特定节日，他有一大群追随者。我能闻到美食的香味。很久没有闻到美食的香味了，所以我走过去表示敬意并吃点午餐。出于某种原因，这位圣人看到我坐在那里吃东西，立刻走过来坐下，哈哈大笑。他的英语不太好，我会说一点印地语，但他试图进行对话，笑得在地上打滚。然后他抓住我的手臂，把我带上这条山路。这有点搞笑，因为有数百名印度人为了和这个家伙呆十秒钟而走了几千英里，而我却是为了吃点东西而闯了进来，他却把我拖上了这条山路。半小时后，我们到达了山顶，那里有一个小水井和一个池塘，他把我的头浸入水中，从口袋里拿出一把剃刀，开始给我剃头。 我完全震惊了。我 19 岁，身处异国，在喜马拉雅山上，这里有一个奇怪的印度巴巴，他刚把我从人群中拉走，在这座山顶上给我剃头。我仍然不明白他为什么要这样做。

Coming back was more of a culture shock than going. Well, Atari called me up and wanted me to go back to work there. I didn’t really want to, but eventually they persuaded me to go back as a consultant. Wozniak and I were hanging out. He took me to some Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where computer hobbyists compared notes and stuff. I didn’t find them all that exciting, but some of them were fun. Wozniak went religiously.

回来的时候比去的时候更让我感到文化冲击。好吧，雅达利给我打电话，想让我回去工作。我其实并不想，但最终他们说服我以顾问的身份回去。沃兹尼亚克和我在一起。他带我去了一些自制计算机俱乐部的会议，那里计算机爱好者们交流经验和其他东西。我并没有觉得它们特别令人兴奋，但有些还是挺有趣的。沃兹尼亚克是非常热衷地去的。

The clubs were based around a computer kit called the Altair. It was so amazing to all of us that somebody had actually come up with a way to build a computer you could own yourself. That had never been possible. Remember, when we were in high school, neither of us had access to a computer mainframe. We had to drive somewhere and have some large company take a benevolent attitude toward us and let us use the computer. But now, for the first time, you could actually buy a computer. The Altair was a kit that came out around 1975 and sold for less than $400. Even though it was relatively inexpensive, not everyone could afford one. That’s how the computer clubs started. People would band together and eventually become a club.

这些俱乐部是围绕一个叫做 Altair 的计算机套件建立的。对我们所有人来说，这真是太惊人了，因为有人实际上想出了一个可以自己拥有计算机的办法。这在以前是不可想象的。记得我们上高中的时候，我们都没有接触到计算机主机。我们必须开车去某个地方，让一些大公司对我们采取善意的态度，允许我们使用计算机。但现在，第一次，你实际上可以购买一台计算机。Altair 是一个在 1975 年左右推出的套件，售价不到 400 美元。尽管它相对便宜，但并不是每个人都能负担得起。这就是计算机俱乐部的起源。人们会聚在一起，最终形成一个俱乐部。

At that time, there were no graphics. It was all alphanumerics, and I used to be fascinated with the programming, simple programming. On the very early versions of computer kits, you didn’t even type; you threw switches that signaled characters.

那时没有图形。全是字母数字，我对编程着迷，简单的编程。在早期的计算机套件版本中，你甚至不需要输入；你只需切换开关来发送字符。

It was just sort of a computer that you could own. They really didn’t know what to do with it. The first thing that they did was to put languages on it, so you could write some programs. People didn’t start to apply them for practical things until a year or two later, and then it was simple things, like bookkeeping.

这只是一种你可以拥有的计算机。他们真的不知道该怎么使用它。他们做的第一件事就是在上面放置语言，这样你就可以编写一些程序。人们直到一两年后才开始将其应用于实际事务，那时只是一些简单的事情，比如记账。

It sort of just happened. I was working a lot at Atari at night and I used to let Woz in. Atari put out a game called Gran Track, the first driving game with a steering wheel to drive it. Woz was a Gran Track addict. He would put great quantities of quarters into these games to play them, so I would just let him in at night and let him onto the production floor and he would play Gran Track all night long. When I came up against a stumbling block on a project, I would get Woz to take a break from his road rally for ten minutes and come and help me. He puttered around on some things, too. And at one point, he designed a computer terminal with video on it. At a later date, he ended up buying a microprocessor and hooking it up to the terminal and made what was to become the Apple I. Woz and I laid out the circuit board ourselves. That was basically it.

事情就是这样发生的。我晚上在雅达利工作很多，我常常让沃兹进来。雅达利推出了一款名为《Gran Track》的游戏，这是第一款使用方向盘的驾驶游戏。沃兹是《Gran Track》的狂热爱好者。他会在这些游戏中投入大量的硬币，所以我晚上就让他进来，带他到生产车间，他会整晚玩《Gran Track》。当我在一个项目上遇到障碍时，我会让沃兹从他的公路拉力赛中休息十分钟，来帮我。他也在一些事情上忙活过。在某个时刻，他设计了一个带视频的计算机终端。后来，他买了一个微处理器，并将其连接到终端上，制作出了后来成为 Apple I 的产品。沃兹和我自己设计了电路板。基本上就是这样。

Yeah, sure. And to be able to show it off to your friends.

是的，当然。并且能够向你的朋友展示它。

Woz and I raised $1300 by selling my VW bus and his Hewlett-Packard calculator to finance them. A guy who started one of the first computer stores told us he could sell them if we could make them. It had not dawned on us until then.

沃兹和我通过出售我的大众巴士和他的惠普计算器筹集了 1300 美元来资助他们。一个开设第一家电脑商店的家伙告诉我们，如果我们能制造它们，他就能卖掉它们。直到那时我们才意识到这一点。

He designed most of it. I helped on the memory part and I helped when we decided to turn it into a product. Woz isn’t great at turning things into products, but he’s really a brilliant designer.

他设计了大部分。我在内存部分提供了帮助，当我们决定将其转变为产品时我也提供了帮助。沃兹在将事物转变为产品方面并不出色，但他真的是一个杰出的设计师。

Completely. We sold only about 150 of them, ever. It wasn’t that big a deal, but we made about $95,000 and I started to see it as a business besides something to do. Apple I was just a printed circuit board. There was no case, there was no power supply; it wasn’t much of a product yet. It was just a printed circuit board. You had to go out and buy transformers for it. You had to buy your own keyboard [laughs].

完全。我们总共只卖出了大约 150 个。这并不是一件大事，但我们赚了大约 95,000 美元，我开始把它视为一种商业，而不仅仅是做点事情。Apple I 只是一个印刷电路板。没有外壳，没有电源；它还不是一个真正的产品。它只是一个印刷电路板。你必须出去为它购买变压器。你还得自己买键盘（笑）。

No, not particularly. Neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere. Woz is motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brilliant pieces of work, which was the disk drive, another key engineering feat that made the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company—trying to find out what a company was. I don’t think it would have happened without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.

不，特别不是。我们都没有想到这会有什么进展。沃兹的动力在于解决问题。他更专注于工程，并进行了他最杰出的工作之一，即磁盘驱动器，这是使苹果 II 成为可能的另一个关键工程成就。我在努力建立公司——试图弄清楚什么是公司。我认为没有沃兹就不会有这一切，我也认为没有我就不会有这一切。

The main thing was that Woz was never really interested in Apple as a company. He was just sort of interested in getting the Apple II on a printed circuit board so he could have one and be able to carry it to his computer club without having the wires break on the way. He had done that and decided to go on to other things. He had other ideas.

主要的问题是，沃兹从来没有真正对苹果公司感兴趣。他只是对将苹果 II 放在印刷电路板上感兴趣，这样他就可以拥有一个，并能够把它带到他的计算机俱乐部，而不必担心在路上电线断掉。他做到了这一点，并决定去做其他事情。他还有其他想法。

Well, I thought the US Festival was a little crazy, but Woz believed very strongly in it.

我觉得美国节有点疯狂，但沃兹对此非常坚信。

When you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way. Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history. He’s going around speaking to a lot of computer events now. He likes that.

当你和某人如此亲密地工作，并经历我们所经历的那些事情时，生活中会有一种纽带。无论你有什么麻烦，这种纽带依然存在。即使随着时间的推移，他可能不是你最好的朋友，但在某种程度上，仍然有超越友谊的东西。沃兹现在过着自己的生活。他已经离开苹果大约五年了。但他所做的将载入历史。他现在在很多计算机活动中演讲。他喜欢这样。

It wasn’t just us. We brought in other people. Wozniak still did the logic of the Apple II, which certainly is a large part of it, but there were some other key parts. The power supply was really a key. The case was really a key. The real jump with the Apple II was that it was a finished product. It was the first computer that you could buy that wasn’t a kit. It was fully assembled and had its own case and its own keyboard, and you could really sit down and start to use it. And that was the breakthrough of the Apple II: that it looked like a real product.

不仅仅是我们。我们还引入了其他人。沃兹尼亚克仍然负责苹果 II 的逻辑，这当然是其中的重要部分，但还有其他一些关键部分。电源真的很关键。机壳也非常重要。苹果 II 的真正飞跃在于它是一个成品。这是第一台你可以购买的不是套件的计算机。它是完全组装好的，拥有自己的机壳和键盘，你可以真正坐下来开始使用它。这就是苹果 II 的突破：它看起来像一个真正的产品。

The difference was that you didn’t have to be a hardware hobbyist with the Apple II. You could be a software hobbyist. That was one of the key breakthroughs with the Apple II: realizing that there were a whole lot more people who wanted to play with a computer, just like Woz and me, than there were people who could build their own. That’s what the Apple II was all about. Still, the first year, we sold only 3000 or 4000.

不同之处在于，你不必是一个硬件爱好者才能使用 Apple II。你可以是一个软件爱好者。这是 Apple II 的一个关键突破：意识到有很多人想要玩电脑，就像沃兹和我一样，而不是只有那些能够自己组装的人。这就是 Apple II 的全部意义。然而，在第一年，我们只卖出了 3000 或 4000 台。

It was giant! We did about $200,000 when our business was in the garage, in 1976. In 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. I mean, it was phenomenal! And in 1978, we did $17,000,000. In 1979, we did $47,000,000. That’s when we all really sensed that this was just going through the rafters. In 1980, we did $117,000,000. In 1981, we did $335,000,000. In 1982, we did $583,000,000. In 1983, we did $985,000,000, I think. This year, it will be a billion and a half.

它太巨大了！在 1976 年，当我们的业务还在车库时，我们的收入大约是 200,000 美元。1977 年，业务大约是 7,000,000 美元。我是说，这真是惊人！在 1978 年，我们的收入是 17,000,000 美元。1979 年，我们的收入是 47,000,000 美元。那时我们都真的感觉到这简直是飞速增长。1980 年，我们的收入是 117,000,000 美元。1981 年，我们的收入是 335,000,000 美元。1982 年，我们的收入是 583,000,000 美元。1983 年，我想我们的收入是 985,000,000 美元。今年，将会达到 15 亿美元。

Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know. The neatest thing was, by 1979, I was able to walk into classrooms that had 15 Apple computers and see the kids using them. And those are the kinds of things that are really the milestones.

好吧，它们只是一个标准而已。最令人惊讶的是，到 1979 年，我能够走进有 15 台苹果电脑的教室，看到孩子们在使用它们。这些就是实际上是里程碑的事情。

A.T.&T.. is absolutely going to be in the business. There is a major transformation in the company that’s taking place right now. A.T.&T. is changing from a subsidized and regulated service-oriented company to a free-market, competitive-marketing technology company. A.T.&T.’s products per se have never been of the highest quality. All you have to do is go look at their telephones. They’re somewhat of an embarrassment. But they do possess great technology in their research labs. Their challenge is to learn how to commercialize that technology. Also, they have to learn about consumer marketing. I think that they will do both of those things, but it’s going to take them years.

A.T.&T.绝对会进入这个行业。公司正在进行重大转型。A.T.&T. 正在从一个补贴和受监管的服务导向公司转变为一个自由市场、竞争营销的科技公司。A.T.&T. 的产品本身从来都不是最高质量的。你只需看看他们的电话，就会觉得有些尴尬。但他们在研究实验室中确实拥有出色的技术。他们的挑战是学习如何将这些技术商业化。此外，他们还需要了解消费者营销。我认为他们会做到这两点，但这将需要他们数年的时间。

I don’t think they’re going to be a giant factor in the next 24 months, but they will learn.

我认为在接下来的 24 个月里，他们不会成为一个巨大的因素，但他们会学习。

Radio Shack is totally out of the picture. They have missed the boat. Radio Shack tried to squeeze the computer into their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment. The sophistication of the computer buyer passed Radio Shack by without their really realizing it. Their market shares dropped through the floor. I don’t anticipate that they’re going to recover and again become a major player.

Radio Shack完全不在考虑范围内。他们错过了机会。Radio Shack试图将计算机纳入他们的零售模式，在我看来，这往往意味着在清仓店环境中销售二流产品或低端产品。计算机买家的成熟度超出了Radio Shack的认知。他们的市场份额暴跌。我不认为他们会恢复并再次成为主要参与者。

Xerox is out of the business. T.I. is doing nowhere near their expectations. As to some of the others, the large companies, like DEC and Wang, can sell to their installed bases. They can sell personal computers as advanced terminals, but that business is going to dwindle.

施乐已经退出了这个行业。T.I.的表现远未达到他们的预期。至于其他一些大型公司，如 DEC 和王，能够向他们的现有客户销售。他们可以将个人电脑作为高级终端销售，但这个业务将会逐渐减少。

I consider those a brochure for why you should buy an Apple II or Macintosh. I think people have already determined that the sub-$500 computers don’t do very much. They either tease people to want more or frustrate people completely.

我认为这些是关于为什么你应该购买 Apple II 或 Macintosh 的宣传册。我认为人们已经确定，售价低于 500 美元的电脑并没有太多功能。它们要么让人们渴望更多，要么完全让人失望。

They are OK if you’re a reporter and trying to take notes on the run. But for the average person, they’re really not that useful, and there’s not all that software for them, either. By the time you get your software done, a new one comes out with a slightly bigger display and your software is obsolete. So nobody is writing any software for them. Wait till we do it—the power of a Macintosh in something the size of a book!

如果你是记者并试图在奔波中做笔记，它们还不错。但对于普通人来说，它们真的没那么有用，而且也没有太多软件可用。当你完成你的软件时，新的设备已经推出，显示屏稍微大一点，你的软件就过时了。所以没有人会为它们编写软件。等我们来做——在一本书大小的设备中拥有 Macintosh 的强大功能！

I’ve said it before: The Japanese have hit the shores like dead fish. They’re just like dead fish washing up on the shores. The Epson has been a failure in this market place.

我之前说过：日本人就像死鱼一样冲上岸。他们就像冲上岸的死鱼。爱普生在这个市场上是个失败。

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. That strategy works only when what they’re working with isn’t changing very much—the stereo industry and the automobile industry are two examples. When the target is moving quickly, they find it very difficult, because that reinvention cycle takes a few years. As long as the definition of what a personal computer is keeps changing at the rate that it is, they will have a very hard time. Once the rate of change slows down, the Japanese will bring all of their strengths to bear on this market, because they absolutely want to dominate the computer business; there’s no question about that. They see that as a national priority. We think that in four to five years, the Japanese will finally figure out how to build a decent computer. And if we’re going to keep this industry one in which America leads, we have four years to become world-class manufacturers. Our manufacturing technology has to equal or surpass that of the Japanese.

日本非常有趣。有些人认为它抄袭东西。我不再这样认为。我认为他们所做的是重新发明东西。他们会拿到已经被发明的东西，研究它直到彻底理解。在某些情况下，他们对它的理解甚至超过了原始发明者。在这种理解的基础上，他们会以更精炼的第二代版本重新发明它。这个策略只有在他们所处理的事物变化不大时才有效——立体声行业和汽车行业就是两个例子。当目标快速移动时，他们会发现非常困难，因为重新发明的周期需要几年时间。只要个人计算机的定义以目前的速度不断变化，他们就会面临很大的困难。一旦变化的速度减缓，日本人将会把他们所有的优势投入到这个市场，因为他们绝对想要主导计算机业务；这一点毫无疑问。他们将其视为国家优先事项。我们认为在四到五年内，日本人最终会弄明白如何制造出一台体面的计算机。 如果我们要保持这个行业让美国领先，我们有四年的时间成为世界级制造商。我们的制造技术必须等于或超过日本的水平。

At the time we designed Macintosh, we also designed a machine to build the machine. We spent $20,000,000 building the computer industry’s most automated factory. But that’s not enough. Rather than take seven years to write off our factory, as most companies would do, we’re writing it off in two. We will throw it away at the end of 1985 and build our second one, and we will write that off in two years and throw that away, so that three years from now, we’ll be on to our third automated factory. That’s the only way we can learn fast enough.

在我们设计 Macintosh 的时候，我们还设计了一台机器来制造这台机器。我们花费了 2000 万美元建造计算机行业最自动化的工厂。但这还不够。与大多数公司需要七年才能折旧，我们的工厂不同，我们将在两年内折旧它。我们将在 1985 年底将其丢弃，并建造我们的第二台工厂，我们将在两年内折旧它并将其丢弃，这样三年后，我们将进入我们的第三台自动化工厂。这是我们能够足够快地学习的唯一方法。

We buy many of our components from the Japanese. We’re the largest user in the world of microprocessors, of high-technology RAM chips, of disk drives, of keyboards. We save a ton of energy not having to make and design floppy-disk drives or microprocessors that we can spend on software.

我们从日本购买了许多组件。我们是世界上最大的微处理器、高科技 RAM 芯片、磁盘驱动器和键盘的用户。我们节省了大量能源，不必制造和设计软盘驱动器或微处理器，这些能源可以用于软件开发。

Certainly, the earlier programming, getting a programming language on a microprocessor chip, was a real breakthrough. VisiCalc was a breakthrough, because that was the first real use of computers in business, where business people could see tangible benefits of using one. Before that, you had to program your own applications, and the number of people who want to program is a small fraction—one percent. Coupled with VisiCalc, the ability to graph things, graph information, was important, and so was Lotus.

当然，早期的编程，将编程语言放在微处理器芯片上，是一个真正的突破。VisiCalc 是一个突破，因为这是计算机在商业中首次真正的应用，商业人士可以看到使用计算机的实际好处。在此之前，你必须自己编写应用程序，而想要编程的人数只占很小一部分——大约百分之一。与 VisiCalc 相结合，图形化事物、图形化信息的能力也很重要，Lotus 也是如此。

What Lotus did was combine a good spread sheet and graphics program. The word-processing and data-base parts of Lotus are certainly not the most robust that one can purchase. The real key to Lotus was that it combined spread sheet and graphics in one program, so you could go between them very rapidly. The next breakthrough is happening now, thanks to the Macintosh, which brought that Lisa technology down to an affordable price. There exists, and there will be more, revolutionary software there. You generally want to truly evaluate a breakthrough a few years after it happens.

Lotus 所做的是将一个优秀的电子表格和图形程序结合在一起。Lotus 的文字处理和数据库部分无疑不是市场上最强大的。Lotus 的真正关键在于它将电子表格和图形结合在一个程序中，因此你可以非常快速地在它们之间切换。下一个突破正在发生，这要归功于 Macintosh，它将 Lisa 技术以可承受的价格带给了用户。那里存在着，并且将会有更多革命性的软件。通常你希望在突破发生几年后真正评估它。

You’re right, I should have listed word processing after VisiCalc. Word processing is the most universally needed application and one of the easiest to understand. It’s probably the first use to which most people put their personal computer. There were word processors before personal computers, but a word processor on a personal computer was more of an economic breakthrough, while there was never any form of VisiCalc before the personal computer.

你说得对，我应该在 VisiCalc 之后列出文字处理。文字处理是最普遍需要的应用程序，也是最容易理解的应用之一。它可能是大多数人使用个人计算机的第一个用途。在个人计算机出现之前就有文字处理器，但在个人计算机上的文字处理器更像是一种经济突破，而在个人计算机之前从未有过任何形式的 VisiCalc。

There has been a lot of very good software in education but not the breakthrough product, not the VisiCalc. I think that will come, but I don’t expect it in the next 24 months.

在教育领域有很多非常好的软件，但没有突破性的产品，没有像 VisiCalc 那样的产品。我认为这会到来，但我不指望在接下来的 24 个月内出现。

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn. We formed something called the Apple Education Foundation, and we give several million dollars in cash and equipment to people doing exploratory work with educational software and to schools that can’t afford computers. We also wanted Macintosh to become the computer of choice in colleges, just as the Apple II is for grade and high schools. So we looked for six universities that were out to make large-scale commitments to personal computers—by large, meaning more than 1000 apiece—and instead of six, we found 24. We asked the colleges if they would invest at least $2,000,000 each to be part of the Macintosh program. All 24—including the entire Ivy League—did. So in less than a year, Macintosh has become the standard in college computing. I could ship every Macintosh we make this year just to those 24 colleges. We can’t, of course, but the demand is there.

计算机本身以及尚未开发的软件将彻底改变我们的学习方式。我们成立了一个名为苹果教育基金会的组织，向从事教育软件探索工作的人员和无法负担计算机的学校提供数百万美元的现金和设备。我们还希望 Macintosh 成为大学的首选计算机，就像 Apple II 在中学和高中一样。因此，我们寻找六所大学，致力于大规模投入个人计算机——这里的大规模是指每所超过 1000 台——结果我们找到了 24 所。我们询问这些大学是否愿意各投资至少 200 万美元以参与 Macintosh 项目。所有 24 所大学——包括整个常春藤联盟——都同意了。因此，在不到一年的时间里，Macintosh 已成为大学计算的标准。我可以将我们今年生产的每一台 Macintosh 都发给这 24 所大学。当然，我们不能这样做，但需求确实存在。

Some of it’s there. What’s not there, the people at colleges are going to write themselves. IBM tried to stop us—I hear it formed a 400-person task force to do it—by giving away IBM PCs. But the colleges were fairly astute. They realized the software investment they were about to embark upon would far outweigh the hardware investment, and they didn’t want to spend all that software money on old technology like IBM’s. So in many cases, they turned down IBM’s offers and went with Macintoshes. In some cases, they used IBM grant money to buy Macintoshes.

有些内容在那里。没有的部分，大学里的人员会自己编写。IBM 试图阻止我们——我听说它成立了一个 400 人的工作组来做到这一点——通过赠送 IBM PC。但大学们相当聪明。他们意识到即将进行的软件投资将远远超过硬件投资，他们不想把所有的软件资金花在像 IBM 这样的旧技术上。因此，在许多情况下，他们拒绝了 IBM 的提议，选择了 Macintosh。在某些情况下，他们使用 IBM 的赠款资金购买了 Macintosh。

Can’t. I’d get them in trouble.

不能。我会让他们陷入麻烦。

None of the really bright people I knew in college went into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late Sixties and Seventies. All of them are in business now—which is funny, because they were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way or another to find some sort of truth about life.

我在大学认识的那些聪明人都没有从政。他们都意识到，在六十年代末和七十年代，政治并不是改变世界的地方。他们现在都在商界——这很有趣，因为他们就是那些去印度旅行，或者以某种方式试图寻找生活真理的人。

No, none of those people care about the money. I mean, a lot of them made a lot of money, but they don’t really care. Their lifestyles haven’t particularly changed. It was the chance to actually try something, to fail, to succeed, to grow. Politics wasn’t the place to be these past ten years if you were eager to try things out. As someone who hasn’t turned 30 yet, I think your 20s are the time to be impatient, and a lot of these people’s idealism would have been deeply frustrated in politics; it would have been blunted. I think it takes a crisis for something to occur in America. And I believe there’s going to be a crisis of significant proportions in the early Nineties as these problems our political leaders should have been addressing boil up to the surface. And that’s when a lot of these people are going to bring both their practical experience and their idealism into the political realm. You’re going to see the best-trained generation ever to go into politics. They’re going to know how to choose people, how to get things done, how to lead.

不，这些人都不在乎钱。我的意思是，他们中的很多人赚了很多钱，但他们并不真的在乎。他们的生活方式并没有特别改变。这是一个真正尝试、失败、成功和成长的机会。如果你渴望尝试新事物，这十年来政治并不是一个好地方。作为一个还没满 30 岁的人，我认为 20 岁是一个急躁的时期，而这些人的理想主义在政治中会受到深深的挫折；它会被削弱。我认为在美国发生某些事情需要危机。我相信在 90 年代初会出现一个重大危机，因为我们政治领导人应该解决的问题浮出水面。到那时，很多人会将他们的实践经验和理想主义带入政治领域。你将看到有史以来最受过良好训练的一代人进入政治。他们将知道如何选择人，如何完成事情，如何领导。

These are different times. The technological revolution is more intertwined every day with our economy and our society—more than 50 percent of America’s gross national product comes from information-based industries—and most political leaders today have had no background in that revolution. It’s going to become crucial that many of the larger decisions we make—how we allot our resources, how we educate our children—be made with an understanding of the technical issues and the directions the technology is taking. And that hasn’t begun happening yet. In education, for example, we have close to a national embarrassment. In a society where information and innovation are going to be pivotal, there really is the possibility that America can become a second-rate industrial nation if we lose the technical momentum and leadership we have now.

这些是不同的时代。技术革命与我们的经济和社会每天都更加交织——美国超过 50%的国民生产总值来自信息产业——而今天大多数政治领导人并没有在这场革命中积累背景。我们所做的许多重大决策——如何分配资源，如何教育我们的孩子——将变得至关重要，这些决策需要在理解技术问题和技术发展方向的基础上做出。而这一点尚未开始发生。例如，在教育方面，我们几乎面临着国家的尴尬。在一个信息和创新将成为关键的社会中，如果我们失去现在所拥有的技术动力和领导力，美国真的有可能沦为二流工业国家。

We’re making the largest investment of capital that humankind has ever made in weapons over the next five years. We have decided, as a society, that that’s where we should put our money, and that raises the deficits and, thus, the cost of our capital. Meanwhile, Japan, our nearest competitor on the next technological frontier—the semiconductor industry—has shaped its tax structure, its entire society, toward raising the capital to invest in that area. You get the feeling that connections aren’t made in America between things like building weapons and the fact that we might lose our semiconductor industry. We have to educate ourselves to that danger.

在接下来的五年里，我们将对武器进行人类历史上最大的资本投资。我们作为一个社会决定将资金投入到这个领域，这导致了赤字的增加，从而提高了我们的资本成本。与此同时，日本，作为我们在下一个技术前沿——半导体行业的最近竞争对手，已经调整了其税收结构和整个社会，以筹集资金进行投资。你会感觉到，在美国，似乎没有将武器制造与我们可能失去半导体行业之间建立联系。我们必须提高对这一危险的认识。

Well, I’ll tell you a story. I saw a video tape that we weren’t supposed to see. It was prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By watching the tape, we discovered that, at least as of a few years ago, every tactical nuclear weapon in Europe manned by U.S. personnel was targeted by an Apple II computer. Now, we didn’t sell computers to the military; they went out and bought them at a dealer’s, I guess. But it didn’t make us feel good to know that our computers were being used to target nuclear weapons in Europe. The only bright side of it was that at least they weren’t [Radio Shack] TRS-80s! Thank God for that. The point is that tools are always going to be used for certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive ways.

好吧，我给你讲个故事。我看到了一盘我们不该看到的录像带。它是为联合参谋部准备的。通过观看这盘录像带，我们发现，至少在几年前，所有由美国人员操作的欧洲战术核武器都是由 Apple II 计算机进行瞄准的。现在，我们并没有把计算机卖给军方；我想他们是去经销商那里购买的。但知道我们的计算机被用来瞄准欧洲的核武器并没有让我们感到好受。唯一的好处是，至少它们不是[Radio Shack] TRS-80！感谢上帝。关键是，工具总是会被用来做一些我们个人不喜欢的事情。最终，决定这些工具是否以积极、富有成效的方式使用的，是人们的智慧，而不是工具本身。

Thus far, we’re pretty much using our computers as good servants. We ask them to do something, we ask them to do some operation like a spread sheet, we ask them to take our key strokes and make a letter out of them, and they do that pretty well. And you’ll see more and more perfection of that—computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it’s going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers. We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

到目前为止，我们基本上是把电脑当作良好的仆人。我们让它们做一些事情，我们让它们进行一些操作，比如电子表格，我们让它们记录我们的按键并生成一封信，它们做得相当不错。你会看到这种“电脑作为仆人”的完美程度越来越高。但接下来将是“电脑作为引导者或代理”。这意味着它将更多地预测我们想要的并为我们完成，注意我们所做的连接和模式，询问我们是否希望定期做某种通用的事情，因此我们将会有触发器的概念。我们将能够让电脑为我们监控某些事情，当某些条件发生时被触发，电脑将采取某些行动并在事后通知我们。

Simple things like monitoring your stocks every hour or every day. When a stock gets beyond set limits, the computer will call my broker and electronically sell it and then let me know. Another example is that at the end of the month, the computer will go into the data base and find all the salesmen who exceeded their sales quotas by more than 20 percent and write them a personalized letter from me and send it over the electronic mail system to them, and give me a report on who it sent the letters to each month. There will be a time when our computers have maybe 100 or so of those tasks; they’re going to be much more like an agent for us. You’re going to see that start to happen a little bit in the next 12 months, but really, it’s about three years away. That’s the next breakthrough.

简单的事情，比如每小时或每天监控你的股票。当股票超出设定的限制时，计算机会给我的经纪人打电话并电子卖出，然后通知我。另一个例子是，在月底，计算机会进入数据库，找到所有超过销售配额 20%以上的销售人员，并给他们写一封我亲自签名的个性化信件，通过电子邮件系统发送给他们，并给我每月发送信件的报告。未来我们的计算机可能会有大约 100 个这样的任务；它们将更像是我们的代理。你会在接下来的 12 个月内看到这一点开始发生，但实际上，这大约还需要三年的时间。这是下一个突破。

All? That would be a dangerous statement, using the word all. I don’t know about that. Macintosh was certainly designed with those concepts in mind.

所有？那将是一个危险的说法，使用“所有”这个词。我对此不太确定。Macintosh 确实是在考虑这些概念的情况下设计的。

That’s inevitably what happens. That’s why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. I think that’s one of Apple’s challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are we going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? I think we’ll do better, because we’re completely aware of it and we make it a priority.

这不可避免地会发生。这就是我认为死亡是生命中最奇妙的发明的原因。它清除了这些过时的旧模型。我认为这真的是苹果面临的挑战之一。当两个年轻人带着下一个东西走进来时，我们会接受并说这太棒了吗？我们是否愿意放弃我们的模型，还是会找借口解释？我认为我们会做得更好，因为我们完全意识到这一点，并将其作为优先事项。

I used to think about selling 1,000,000 computers a year, but it was just a thought. When it actually happens, it’s a totally different thing. So it was, “Holy shit, it’s actually coming true!” But what’s hard to explain is that this does not feel like overnight. Next year will be my tenth year. I had never done anything longer than a year in my life. Six months, for me, was a long time when we started Apple. So this has been my life since I’ve been sort of a free-willed adult. Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.

我曾经想过每年销售 1,000,000 台电脑，但这只是个想法。当它真正发生时，完全是另一回事。所以我想，“天哪，这居然成真了！”但难以解释的是，这并没有感觉像是一夜之间的事情。明年将是我的第十年。我一生中从未做过超过一年的事情。对我来说，六个月在我们创办苹果时已经算很长了。因此，自从我成为一个有自由意志的成年人以来，这就是我的生活。每一年都充满了问题、成功、学习经历和人类经历，在苹果公司，一年就是一生。所以这已经是十个一生。

There’s an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: “For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” As I’m going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind.

有一句古老的印度谚语时不时浮现在我脑海中：“在你生命的前 30 年，你养成习惯；在你生命的后 30 年，你的习惯塑造你。”因为我将在 2 月份满 30 岁，这个想法曾在我脑海中闪现。

And I’m not sure. I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

我不太确定。我会一直与苹果保持联系。我希望在我的一生中，我的生活线和苹果的线能够交织在一起，就像一幅挂毯。可能会有几年我不在，但我总会回来。这就是我可能会尝试做的事情。关于我的关键点是，我仍然是一个学生。我仍然在训练营。如果有人在阅读我的想法，我希望你能记住这一点。不要太认真对待。如果你想以一种创造性的方式生活，作为一个艺术家，你必须不太回头。你必须愿意抛弃你所做的和你曾经是谁。我们到底是什么呢？我们认为自己大部分只是喜欢和不喜欢、习惯、模式的集合。我们核心的东西是我们的价值观，而我们所做的决定和行动反映了这些价值观。这就是为什么做采访和被关注很困难：当你在成长和变化时，外界越是试图强化一个它认为的你的形象，继续作为一个艺术家就越困难，这就是为什么很多时候，艺术家不得不说：“再见。我得走了。” 我快疯了，我要离开这里。” 然后他们去某个地方冬眠。也许过一段时间他们会以稍微不同的方式重新出现。

[Laughs] Because of guilt. Guilt over the money.

[笑] 因为内疚。对金钱的内疚。

And when I was 24, my net worth was more than $10,000,000; when I was 25, it was more than $100,000,000.

当我 24 岁时，我的净资产超过了 10,000,000 美元；当我 25 岁时，它超过了 100,000,000 美元。

Visibility. The number of people who have a net worth of more than $1,000,000 in this country is in the tens of thousands. The number of people who have a net worth of more than $10,000,000 gets down to thousands. And the number who have a net worth of more than $100,000,000 gets down to a few hundred.

可见性。在这个国家，净资产超过 1,000,000 美元的人数在数万之中。净资产超过 10,000,000 美元的人数降到几千。而净资产超过 100,000,000 美元的人数降到几百。

I still don’t understand it. It’s a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime—and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values.

我仍然不理解。这是一项巨大的责任，拥有超过你一生中可以花费的财富——我觉得我必须花掉它。如果你去世，你肯定不想把一大笔钱留给你的孩子。这只会毁了他们的生活。如果你去世时没有孩子，这些钱都会归政府。几乎每个人都会认为，他可以比政府更聪明地将这笔钱投资回人类。挑战在于弄清楚如何与之共存，并将其重新投资于世界，这意味着要么捐赠，要么用它来表达你的关切或价值观。

That’s a part of my life that I like to keep private. When I have some time, I’m going to start a public foundation. I do some things privately now.

这是我喜欢保持私密的生活的一部分。当我有时间时，我打算成立一个公共基金会。我现在做一些私人的事情。

Oh, you have to. I’m convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar.

哦，你必须这样做。我相信有效地赠送一美元比赚一美元要难。

No. There are some simple reasons for that. One is that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that’s the problem with most philanthropy—there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better. Also, most of the time, the people who come to you with ideas don’t provide the best ideas. You go seek the best ideas out, and that takes a lot of time.

不。原因很简单。其一是，要想学会做好某件事，有时必须经历失败。为了失败，必须有一个衡量系统。这就是大多数慈善事业的问题——没有衡量系统。你给某人一些钱去做某事，而大多数时候你根本无法衡量你对那个人或他的想法或他们的实施的判断是否成功或失败。因此，如果你无法成功或失败，就很难变得更好。此外，大多数时候，向你提出想法的人并不提供最佳的想法。你需要去寻找最佳的想法，而这需要很多时间。

Because I haven’t done anything much yet. In that area, actions should speak the loudest.

因为我还没有做太多事情。在那个领域，行动应该是最有说服力的。

Are you completely virtuous or do you admit to any extravagances?

你是完全有德行的，还是承认有任何奢侈行为？

Well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and…. My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. As it is, I pay a price by not having much of a personal life. I don’t have the time to pursue love affairs or to tour small towns in Italy and sit in cafes and eat tomato-and-mozzarella salad. Occasionally, I spend a little money to save myself a hassle, which means time. And that’s the extent of it. I bought an apartment in New York, but it’s because I love that city. I’m trying to educate myself, being from a small town in California, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a large city. I consider it part of my education. You know, there are many people at Apple who can buy everything that they could ever possibly want and still have most of their money unspent. I hate talking about this as a problem; people are going to read this and think, Yeah, well, give me your problem. They’re going to think I’m an arrogant little asshole.

我生活中最喜欢的东西是书籍、寿司和……我生活中最喜欢的东西不花任何钱。很明显，我们所有人最宝贵的资源是时间。就这样，我为没有太多个人生活付出了代价。我没有时间去追求爱情，或者去意大利的小镇游玩，坐在咖啡馆里吃番茄和马苏里拉奶酪沙拉。偶尔，我花一点钱来省去麻烦，这意味着时间。就这样。我在纽约买了一套公寓，但那是因为我爱这个城市。我试图自我教育，来自加利福尼亚的小镇，没有在大城市的复杂和文化中成长。我把这视为我教育的一部分。你知道，苹果公司有很多人可以买到他们可能想要的一切，仍然有大部分钱没有花。我讨厌把这当作问题来谈；人们会读到这些并想，嗯，那把你的问题给我。他们会觉得我这个人很傲慢。

The minute you have the means to take responsibility for your own dreams and can be held accountable for whether they come true or not, life is a lot tougher. It’s easy to have wonderful thoughts when the chance to implement them is remote. When you’ve gotten to a place where you at least have a chance of implementing your ideas, there’s a lot more responsibility in that.

一旦你有能力为自己的梦想负责，并且可以对它们是否实现承担责任，生活就变得更加艰难。当实现这些想法的机会渺小时，拥有美好的想法是很容易的。当你达到一个至少有机会实现自己想法的地方时，责任就大得多。

When I came back from India, I found myself asking, What was the one most important thing that had struck me? And I think it was that Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic. It is a learned ability. It had never occurred to me that if no one taught us how to think this way, we would not think this way. And yet, that’s the way it is. Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools available to them. Humans are tool users. What’s really incredible about a book is that you can read what Aristotle wrote. You don’t have to have some teacher’s interpretation of Aristotle. You can certainly get that, but you can read exactly what Aristotle wrote. That direct transmission of thoughts and ideas is one of the key building blocks of why we are where we are, as a society. But the problem with a book is that you can’t ask Aristotle a question. I think one of the potentials of the computer is to somehow … capture the fundamental, underlying principles of an experience.

当我从印度回来时，我发现自己在问，什么是让我印象最深刻的一件事？我认为是西方的理性思维并不是一种与生俱来的特征，而是一种学习能力。以前我从未想到，如果没有人教我们这样思考，我们就不会这样思考。然而，事实就是如此。显然，教育的一个重大挑战就是教会我们如何思考。我们发现，随着越来越多的孩子拥有这些工具，计算机实际上会影响思维的质量。人类是工具的使用者。书籍真正令人难以置信的地方在于，你可以阅读亚里士多德所写的内容。你不必依赖某位老师对亚里士多德的解读。你当然可以得到这样的解读，但你可以准确地阅读亚里士多德所写的内容。这种思想和观念的直接传递是我们作为一个社会所处现状的关键基石之一。但书籍的问题在于，你无法向亚里士多德提问。我认为计算机的潜力之一在于以某种方式……捕捉经验的基本、根本原则。

Here’s a very crude example. The original video game, Pong, captured the principles of gravity, angular momentum and things like that, to where each game obeyed those underlying principles, and yet every game was different—sort of like life. That’s the simplest example. And what computer programming can do is to capture the underlying principles, the underlying essence, and then facilitate thousands of experiences based on that perception of the underlying principles. Now, what if we could capture Aristotle’s world view—the underlying principles of his world view? Then you could actually ask Aristotle a question. OK. You might say it would not be exactly what Aristotle was. It could be all wrong. But maybe not.

这是一个非常粗略的例子。原始视频游戏《乒乓》捕捉了重力、角动量等原理，使得每个游戏都遵循这些基本原理，但每个游戏又是不同的——有点像生活。这是最简单的例子。而计算机编程所能做的就是捕捉这些基本原理、基本本质，然后基于对这些基本原理的理解，促进成千上万的体验。那么，如果我们能够捕捉亚里士多德的世界观——他世界观的基本原理呢？那么你实际上可以问亚里士多德一个问题。好吧。你可能会说这并不完全是亚里士多德的样子。可能完全错误。但也许不是。

Exactly. Part of the challenge, I think, is to get these tools to millions and tens of millions of people and to start to refine these tools so that someday we can crudely, and then in a more refined sense, capture an Aristotle or an Einstein or a Land while he’s alive. Imagine what that could be like for a young kid growing up. Forget the young kid—for us! And that’s part of the challenge.

没错。我认为挑战的一部分是将这些工具推广到数百万甚至数千万的人，并开始改进这些工具，以便有一天我们能够粗略地，然后以更精细的方式，捕捉到亚里士多德、爱因斯坦或兰德在世时的样子。想象一下，这对一个正在成长的年轻孩子来说会是什么样子。忘掉年轻孩子——对我们来说也是如此！这就是挑战的一部分。

That’s for someone else. It’s for the next generation. I think an interesting challenge in this area of intellectual inquiry is to grow obsolete gracefully, in the sense that things are changing so fast that certainly by the end of the Eighties, we really want to turn over the reins to the next generation, whose fundamental perceptions are state-of-the-art perceptions, so that they can go on, stand on our shoulders and go much further. It’s a very interesting challenge, isn’t it? How to grow obsolete with grace.

那是为了其他人。是为了下一代。我认为在这个智力探索领域，一个有趣的挑战是优雅地变得过时，因为事物变化得如此之快，到了八十年代末，我们确实希望将接力棒交给下一代，他们的基本认知是最先进的认知，这样他们可以继续前进，站在我们的肩膀上走得更远。这是一个非常有趣的挑战，不是吗？如何优雅地变得过时。