Another one of those colorful epigrammatic statements from Steve Jobs, meant to inspire and motivate a development team to fully complete an ambitious project, especially once the “train has left the station”: designs are largely decided, prototypes rapidly being built and approved, and back-end programming has begun, signalling that “This is for real, folks!”, no longer some design concept or skunkwork exercise. The implication: decisions gotta be called and owned up to, tradeoffs made, and just drive towards making this real for the customers.

A little googling about this reveals the broader context for this particular slogan– shipping the first release of the Macintosh computer, which at the time was way over-schedule, etc. etc.

Below is a quotation from Steven Levy’s chronicle of the first Mac, titled Insanely Great, explaining the slogan: