Andy Hertzfeld Quotes

Working long hours being single helps because your time is yours. Once you have a family your time isn’t all yours anymore. Most of the Mac team, we were in our mid-20’s, most of us were single, and we were able to essentially devote our lives to it.

We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.

The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn’t as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people.

Scotty heard that I was thinking about quitting Apple because of his actions, so he called me into his office and asked what it would take for me to stay? I said, maybe if I could work on the Mac project, which Steve had just taken over from Jef Raskin.

People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don’t really need to understand humans so well.

Part of Steve’s job was to drum into us how important what we were doing actually would be to the world.