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Steve Wozniak "Steve Jobs Played No Role In My Designs For the Apple I & II"
mikejuk writes: In a recent interview with very lucky 14-year old Sarina Khemchandani for her website, ReachAStudent, Steve Wozniak was more than precise about the role of Steve Jobs. "Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He'd never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn't know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that's what he wanted to do. The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed." He also says a lot of interesting things in the three ten minute videos about life, electronics and education.
Yes, we knew Jobs had an over-inflated ego. That came out long before his death.
NeXT was a flop. They couldn't sell anything. It was vastly overpriced and hardly world class. The only reason that Jobs ended up back at Apple was because the OS that Apple was using at the time was hopelessly outdated and unstable and Scully was running the company into the ground. Obviously they couldn't use Windows so they needed something and the UNIX based system that NeXT was using fit the bill.
Mind you, the first few iterations of OSX were pretty bad as well. Slow, buggy and crash prone but it was a start. Apple stuck with it and got it right. I'll give Jobs credit for switching to Intel based processors. That was probably the smartest thing he did. And I'll give him credit for the whole "vertical stack" thing where Apple builds the hardware and designs the software. That was smart.
But Woz was the hands on guy. He was the guy that got it done and I don't think he gets enough credit for the overall success of the company. I'm not anti Apple or anything. I like their products. I just tend to think that Jobs gets more credit than he deserves.
Now this all comes out after his death..Sounds like an over inflated ego to me
That thought crossed my mind as well. Since Jobs ain't there to contradict him....
Speaking as a former Apple ][ dev, this was all common knowledge. Jobs was the salesman, Woz was the engineer. That said, sales was certainly a very important and critical role. Both Steves were absolutely essential to Apple's success. Jobs got an upgrade in our view post-Mac due to his look-and-feel design work, but still he was never thought of as a hands on tech person.
Woz is the hero of the Apple story to engineers, Jobs is the hero to wall street. The mainstream news and the public at large merely lean towards the wall street perspective.