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All great artists directly copy ideas. That is exactly what the statement implies. The point is that your own style will manifest as a mishmash of other people's ideas and this itself will constitute a new style. New ideas are just combinations of old ideas

The way I always understood it is that good artists put their spin on it.

Great artists realize perfection when they see it and just copy it, without trying to “improve” it, usually from lesser known, less successful artists so they get away with it.

Right. In Jobs world, that meant stuff like taking existing Chinese tech and making it into something with worldwide wow/cool factor.

You got me curious. Which Chinese tech did he steal to make the iProducts with?

> Jobs world, that meant stuff like taking existing Chinese tech

It was a reference to Apple apocryphally stealing "the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at [Xerox] PARC" [1].

They didn't copy an existing product. They deprived Xerox of the market into which to launch their own product.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html