Steve Jobs Movie Clip Historically Inaccurate, Says Woz

Yesterday saw the release of a clip from the upcoming movie jOBS, a biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The clip shows Jobs, played by Ashton Kutcher, having a conversation with Steve Wozniak, played by Josh Gad, about how influential an operating system for a personal computer would be. The real Steve Wozniak commented on the clip, saying the situation it portrayed was "totally wrong." He said, "Personalities and where the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs. They inspired me and were widely spoken at the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve came back from Oregon and came to a club meeting and didn't start talking about this great social impact. His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away. Steve came from selling surplus parts at HalTed he always saw a way to make a quick buck off my designs (this was the 5th time). The lofty talk came much further down the line." Wozniak was quick to add that he isn't making any judgment on the quality of the movie based on a single, 1-minute clip, and that the rest of the movie may or may not be more accurate. He also says he hopes it's entertaining.

Comments

Apple summed up in one breath!

[phx_zs]

"His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away"

Re:Apple summed up in one breath!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have mod points right now, I'm an across-the-board Apple user, and I think this movie is very likely no more than sycophantic shite for pinheads.

Everything the Mac is, came from Apple engineers. Not Jobs. Everything I like about Macs (which is almost everything), and everything I hate (like the stupid, stupid one-menu-to-serve-them-all, the inability to send keystrokes to anything but the frontmost app, the immense memory leaks in Safari, the limited control of the audio system, the broken color pipeline, the constant stream of deprecated APIs, the crackpot leakage of IOS concepts into OSX, the lack of a mid-tower... I could go on but I'll spare you.) Likewise, everything the iPad/Phone/Pod ecosystem is, came from Apple engineers. Not Jobs.

Jobs took these things and marketed them. He cherrypicked them, too. Whoopie. This is only notable in a culture that is in love with illusion -- television, etc.

Jobs is gone. Apple isn't. Apple still puts out great products. And bugs and irritations. And tries to be our "mommy." It's like anything good, really... issues remain. So the best users keep poking at them, hopefully they will do better as a result.

Anyway, none of my mod points, at least, will be used to step on those irritated with the Apple PR machine, which, IMHO, is the only place you will ever run into Jobs. Or his shade.

Re:Oops

[ShanghaiBill]

One wonders why they didn't bother asking Woz for information about what happened.

Because they are more interested in making the movie entertaining than historically accurate. Woz is quibbling over details. Most movies about things that really happened have huge deviations from accuracy. For example, the movie about Facebook had a completely made-up girlfriend as a significant character.

Re:Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the truth doesn't sell well. Blind idol worship over a dead guy is much sexier.

The sad fact of life is ...

[chepati]

... that 50 years from now the media will have deified Jobs and next generations will believe he was a much much larger than life superhero who bootstrapped the entire computer industry and singlehandedly created new innovative products and touched so many people on a deep and personal level through his enduring work. And the real heros, Woz and the hundreds of Apple engineers and designers, will remain a footnote in some obscure appendix in a seldom read computer book, if that.

Makes me sick, this cult of the Jobs personality and posthumous canonization of a glorified $20-profit salesman.

Re:Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

Woz is quibbling over details.

I dunno. Woz is actually quite nice. If somebody made a movie with me in it in which I wear a suit and tie even though I never do that in real life, I'd be pretty pissed.

Re:Oops

[antdude]

If they were accurate, then they would be documentaries. ;)