“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”
What I think is misunderstood here is that they do not depend on market research to decide what products to make. They do, however, do a lot of research about the markets they will operate in to market and sell their products. Below are some examples of the understanding Steve Jobs has of his markets.
Here is an early draft of the Apple Macintosh business plan which includes a section on markets for the Mac. Here is the Macintosh Product Introduction Plan written in 1983.
Here is a video where Steve Jobs explains the market fit for NeXT computers, his startup after leaving Apple.
