The Quotable Steve Jobs

In case you weren’t following our liveblog coverage of yesterday’s Apple financial results, a few salient details may have escaped your attention. Chief among them, that a surprise guest joined the conference call: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama! Fine. Okay. It was Steve Jobs. I guess that’s almost as exciting.

Steve doesn’t appear on a lot of these conference calls—a mere handful since his return to the company—and he declined a request from an analyst to make it a regular event, saying “I AM THE STEVE! The Steve does not answer your puny questions! Mend your errant ways!” The analyst in question immediately hung up, moved to Montana, and opened an alpaca farm. Such is the power of the Steve.

That taken care of, Steve spent most of his time firing off Dan-Rather-folksy-wisecracks on the analysts’ inquiries. We’ve excerpted a few of the best, and our notes, below:

On whether or not there’s room to expand in the iPhone market.
“I wasn’t alive at the time, but from everything I’ve heard, Babe Ruth had only one home run, he just kept hitting it over and over again.” (The original off-the-cuff comment Steve practiced involved Barry Bonds, but it was dropped after Apple Legal informed him it would require an asterisk.)

On whether Apple will try to appeal to other segments of the computer market.
“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk and our DNA will not let us ship that.” (But keep your eyes peeled for the $499 iJunk, coming soon to an Apple Store near you.)

On one analyst’s proposal of what to do with Apple’s $25 billion cash reserve.
“Hiring every engineer in Silicon Valley is a good idea, though.” (Steve had originally concocted a complicated investment plan for doubling Apple’s investment, which entailed putting $25 billion “on red”.)

On the economy.
“We are not economists. Your next door neighbor can likely predict what’s going to happen as well as we can.” (Unless, of course, your next door neighbor is Paul Krugman.)

On Apple’s customers.
“[They’re] the smartest, most product-aware customers in the market.” (Added Steve, “And gosh darn it, they smell fantastic. Have you ever really smelled an Apple customer? It’s like…cinnamon and fresh C-notes.”)

On Apple’s $25 billion cash reserve.
“We’re very comfortable with our cash position in the bank and it’s not burning a hole in our pocket.” (Though, Jobs noted, if they really wanted to, they could hire Jerry Seinfield for their ad campaign 2500 times.)

On making his appearance on the call a regular event.
“Peter and Tim do such a good job that I don’t think I could add much.” (Future calls will, however, feature Apple SVP of Industrial Design Jony Ive, who will say nothing and stare unnervingly at the phone.)

And that’s it until Apple’s next call in January, at which point we will all be recovering from the post-Macworld Expo haze. My inside sources report that in order to stave off the disappointment of no Steve in the Q1 call, Cook and Oppenheimer will perfect their adaptation of Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?” routine.