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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.
i hear hissing sounds from the apple camp.
Now this all comes out after his death..Sounds like an over inflated ego to me
so its good he died?
what did he do anyway?
why was it a big deal when he left apple?
I'm sure we already all knew it, but it is good to hear it come from him for once.
Apple is for goatse lovers. (you know the picture)
I think that's obvious. As a developer you have my respect and my sympathy for crossing paths with such assholes like Jobs.
but with fruit
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Mr. Wozniak, like most real doers got wrongfully overshadowed by a BIG TALKING BLOWHARD BULLSHITTER named Steve Jobs.
* I do NOT like "speaking ill of the dead" but it's only FACT... my fellow polish descended U.S. Citizen got screwed for a big mouth bullshit artist.
APK
P.S.=> It's always that way - & it ALWAYS makes me laugh when I see things like "The 'great inventor' Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that... apk
The best product is meaningless if you don't have someone like Jobs shoving it down people's throats to get them to buy. Same with Woz, if you don't have something really cool to sell, then no one would have listened to Steve for very long. Two sides of the same coin. I'm not an Apple or Jobs fan, but obviously Steve did a lot of things right for a long time.
I doubt Woz was very good at sales. I doubt Steve was very good at building computers. No product "sells itself", and anyone who really believes that is an idiot.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Hey Steve Cook, give Woz some stock in recognition for a lifetime of making Apple successful to survive to this era.
I am so sick of the cult of authority worship.
It's part of the worship of the wealthy.
It's part of the denigration of work, as the executives go around saying that engineers are and should be interchangable, we're fry cooks, and working us to death is slightly more efficient than allowing us lives. And so we should all be worked to death.
Just curious. The fact that this is "news" on /. has me worried. Are people going to attribute the early Apple computer designs to Jobs in the way that many people think Henry Ford invented the car? Is history going to say "Steve Jobs invented the Apple computer.. and some other guy was there too."
Show of hands, and be honest. Who didn't know this?
because of the media's worship of Jobs. What's he anyways? An executive? The man famous for bullshit? "Reality distortion field"
For bad decisions like making the first macs impossible to expand?
For bad decisions like not making products where you can change a battery that's lost half it's capacity in six months?
Don't you feel a bit cheated?
Who ever thought that Jobs was ever involved technically in in low levels of early Apple design, especially in things like the AppleII hardware? I sure didn't. I don't see why that needed clarifying...
If anything, the only open question would be is if Jobs had any role in the case design of the Apple I or II, though they weren't so fabulous that credit would really matter...
I've always thought credit for the original Apple systems was fairly placed between Woz doing amazing hardware work and Jobs drumming up sales and (far more importantly) partnerships and funding.
P.S. For the Apple Haters out there who need every little thing made ultra-clear for your warped frothing minds, the "more important" part above refers to more important than sales, not more important than the hardware design.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
external batteries strapped to them. It's the "I made an incompetent decision buying an overpriced phone/computer spiked with Jobs' incompetent ideas, and I'm too egotistical to admit it," style.
Mr. Wozniak, like most real doers got wrongfully overshadowed by a BIG TALKING BLOWHARD BULLSHITTER named Steve Jobs.
* I do NOT like "speaking ill of the dead" but it's only FACT... my fellow polish descended U.S. Citizen got screwed for a big mouth bullshit artist - a fucking LEECH who hung onto Mr. Wozniak's coattails since he lacked what it REALLY took (technical know-how) since ANY damn fool can do P.R. work!
APK
P.S.=> It's always that way - & it ALWAYS makes me laugh when I see things like "The 'great inventor' Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that... apk
Except that the next thing is that due to google, all human jobs will be replaced by robots who can talk and drive cars and no one will have any privacy as the human race is phased out.
So.. maybe it will say that Google invented the new people and there used to be a disgusting version 1.0 made of putrid juices.
Quote is addressing a wee bit of a straw man. Still, it's a good drop of blood in the water for the Jobs haters to turn out.
Which was no doubt the idea behind posting it in the first place.
..to those who understand technology companies
This might be a surprise to members of the general public who assume everybody in a tech company is an engineer
It is easy to say now that computers sell themselves and nobody cares who designed or marketed Model 34 of personal computing device Number 152 from AAAA Computer Co. But back when it was just Woz and Jobs there wasn't a market for small electronic computing devices. Yes, people like Woz were designing them and sharing them with their friends for fun after work, but there was no apparent niche for them in the marketplace.
Jobs and a few others changed that. The marketplace we know now would not have existed if it were not for people like Jobs who decided how to sell these things to people like us. There were many different designs being worked on at the time, many were probably quite decent, but Jobs and Woz got together, so Woz's design won.
Designing good products is hard, but not that hard. Marketing bad product is hard, but not that hard (take a look at the crap out there that sells). Woz and Jobs are lucky they found each other because good design and good marketing in one place and one time is rare. They teamed up when the time was ripe. While many others could have done it, nobody else did, therefore they get the credit.
Hate sales and marketing all you want. Lord knows I do. But, without them, your genius never leaves your Mom's basement.
Did Woz develop the Mac, IPod, iPhone?
Jobs may not have engineered those devices, but they would never have existed without him. And, he definitely impacted their design. I own no Apple products, but I'm not stupid enough to deny the obvious Earthshaking impact they have had on the world.
I think its clear Jobs was never a technical guy and relied on brilliant engineers like Woz over the years to create his visions. Jobs knew what people wanted even before they knew. Because he knew how to make them want something. Its always been about want not need. People need PC's but to have people want a Mac or a iPad or iPod, or the now top selling iPhone for Apple is to be able to name your price and they will come. Its always been about the details in marketing. Apple never was successful until Jobs figured out how to make people want Apple products. Woz did do great things with Apple 1 and 2. But his success was always muted until the want factor played a big role in Apple. This is of course why Jobs is so admired. This is also why Woz is not so admired. Engineers are a dime a dozen unless your a Jony Ives who also has some vision mixed in.
that seems very plausible
does anyone know who was actually responsible for the idea of NextStep?
This is so true. I'm really good at a few things and pretty bad at a lot of things. In 20 years, I've developed two pretty impressive products, products that were a generation ahead of all competitors. I sure wish I had someone like Steve Jobs turning my good products into great companies!
I barely made a living from my products because I suck at marketing and I'm not very good at running a company. I sure wish I had someone with marketing and business talent to turn my products, like Clonebox, into highly successful businesses.
I've recently learned that in successful companies, the cost of the product or service itself is about 20%-30% of the selling price. Marketing, sales, etc are 60%-70%, and bottom-line profit is around 10%-20%. If the product or service is 25% of the revenue, that means MOST of what is important in a company isn't the product. A good product is important (it's 25%), but it's not as important as everything else.
Apple is an example in that Steve Jobs led Apple to success on several occasions with products that didn't involve Woz. Wozniak built computers, Jobs built (and rebuilt) companies.
Both are important roles.
This is hardly news for anyone, but reminded me of an anecdote from when both Steves were in their early twenties that summarizes the dynamic between them nicely:
When Steve Jobs worked at Atari, the company was working on creating the arcade game Breakout, which required 80 Integrated Circuits (ICs). The less ICs there were, the cheaper the games would be to produce, so Nolan Bushnell (Atari's president) offered $100 for every IC that could be knocked out of the design. Jobs brought Woz the challenge, and over four days and nights at Atari they put together a design that only required 30 ICs. Bushnell gave Jobs his $5000 bonus, which Jobs "split" with Wozniak by telling him it was a $700 bonus, giving him "half," or $350.
They were both exceptional. Woz an exceptional engineer, Jobs an exceptional sleazebag.
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.
No doubt true. But if were not for Steve Jobs, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Woz probably wouldn't be uncountably rich, and no-one would have heard of the Apple I and Apple II (they probably wouldn't have even been called that).
Why do tech people consistently dismiss the contribution of people who actually market what they make?
Back in the day his name was pronounced "J-oh-bzzz". But that's neither here nor there. Was he a techie? Not really But what he should be credited with is his marketing prowess. He was a marketing genius. Very few could even come close to his brilliance in that respect.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Net worth is worthless bullshit and not even remotely close to accurate. Another example would be that Linus Torvalds isn't worth anywhere close to 150M, (He hangs out on G+ you can even find the discussion there.)
that he waited until Jobs was dead to say this. Makes me think so highly of him as a human being.
There aren't words strong enough for you.
Licensed the GUI from Xerox, invented by people like Alan Kay.
Damn it, now I want to take Jobs' side.
He doesn't SOUND like a Republican
This part is missing from the summary: He does however point out that his partnership [sic] Jobs was important. A great product wouldn't do anyone any good unless it sells - and for that you need a company: "So it's very important, even if you are not a business man, find someone who is."
In the early years Woz was undoubtably important. In particular, I think it is clear that electronically, technically the brains was Steve Wozniak. This is obvious especially if you hear about the story of them working on Breakout together. And at that time in the late seventies where computers were expensive and being very clever about reducing the number of chips to the bare minimum, Woz's skill set was important. These skills became less important as hardware became cheaper and economy of scale made ASICs practical (look at the design of the Commodore 64). You could argue the weird interleaved video memory was a design flaw that hung around on the Apple II forever, but it was necessary to get color cheaply enough with just stock 74 series logic and 6502 CPU. On the other hand, the idea of making an all-inclusive consumer item with an injection molded case was definitely pushed for by Jobs (apple 2 history). That is what made the Apple II sell where the Apple I didn't. Woz's world view was that everybody could just put together a kit and choose a keyboard and their own TV (that was the Apple I). That wasn't going to fly in the long run, and Woz didn't see that, but Jobs did. I think a lot of people here are saying Jobs was a great salesman. That is true, but I think it is more that he wanted to make a beautiful product that he would enjoy and thus it would sell because others would enjoy the beautiful deisgn too.
I think in later years, especially the development of the Macintosh, Jobs was much more influential. Read folklore.org. There are concrete aesthetic pushes that Jobs asked for. That is good leadership. Did he make the prototypes, did he design the prototypes. No, but he had taste and pushed it and chose people that would satisfy it. You can see the difference between the Atari ST, windows 1.0, amiga OS and Mac OS. Mac OS had a brillaint aesthetic with good fonts (he had taken calligraphy and cared about fonts). The others were rubbish. It took until Windows 95 for PCs to look as good as Mac OS did. But by 2000 MacOS X had pushed the visual aesthetic of operating systems to the next level. It's hard to over-estimate how important it is for a machine to look good and to have good aesthetic, and many of the nerds here that are all function over form kind of people just don't get it. The rounded rect anecdote on folklore.org is another great thing to look at.
I think that is what he added to the equation, even on the Apple II. I think where Jobs was smart was that he wasn't just form over function. He desired to have things looking good everywhere, but if it wasn't going to electronically work, then he wouldn't force it (see mac PC board).
He had insight on how to do that several times. Apple II was the start of it, Mac was even better, NeXT was a refinement of Mac, but the ipod, iphone, and MacOS were the things that sealed his legacy.
Did Steve Jobs design everything. No. Was he the messiah. No. But he often acted as a catalyst and had a unifying vision and was capable of building teams to realize that vision.
whoosh!
So Jobs role was to judge that Apple had enough of a monopoly on design to make more money by screwing the customer and throwing away the downscale/rational part of the market.
Make products that deliberately wear out, make products that can not keep pace and must be replaced. That was his contribution.
No one can prove that Apple wouldn't have been just as successful or more successful if it didn't try to screw its consumers that way.
But I must admit that by screwing the proles they gave themselves some cache and the proles seemed to beg to be screwed. Maybe there's some weird classism where people WANT to waste money on an inferior product to prove that they can afford act like a rich person.
We'd all be using OS/2 v.12 now.
> Licensed the GUI from Xerox, invented by people like Alan Kay.
Apple didn't license the GUI. They got demos, but no code. Bill Atkinson had to guess at how the Alto worked in order to write QuickDraw.
In fact, Xerox later sued Apple over for copyright infringement over the GUI.
Anyone with any common sense knew jobs was your atypical CEO - sitting around taking credit for everyone else's hard work. He was scum unworthy of remembrance or praise.
He hasn't done anything useful or noteworthy since the universal remote. Only useless idiots prop him up as some great engineer, because he hasn't been relevant for decades.
For bad decisions like making the first macs impossible to expand?
Why was that bad? At the time it set the Mac in contrast to the PC as a much easier system to use because you didn't have to mess with the insides (shades of today). The original Mac was very popular...
For bad decisions like not making products where you can change a battery that's lost half it's capacity in six months?
First off, what product lost "half it's capacity in six months"? All Apple sealed iPhones I've had have more like 80% capacity after two years... in fact the only products I ever had battery capacity diminish much from over a lifetime were Powerbooks that you could remove the battery on... one of the older models I think I ended up replacing the battery every 16 months or so. Laptop battery performance has been vastly better in the models with sealed batteries.
Secondly, again why is this a *bad* choice? I mean, it's so "bad" that Samsung and pretty much every Android maker have copied it wholesale, and iPhone sales are still increasing... external battery packs (and larger internal batteries) have made replaceable batteries pointless. With an iPhone 6 Plus I can easily go through an international flight and a day of heavy use without having to charge the phone.
It's really odd you would pick as examples ONE aspect of Apple design which has served them quite well over the years, instead of pointing out actual flawed product aspects that were produced under Jobs (like Lisa pricing).
As for Jobs himself, I don't worship him either but the admiration many have is because of results that came about under his leadership. It doesn't really matter who did what when so much as somehow it all came together really, really well... a leader gets some amount of credit for what he lets people do and what he stops them from doing. People often admire effective people (sports, movies, etc) regardless of other character flaws. There are plenty of actors I would not like personally but I greatly look forward to seeing them perform.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jobs was the big picture guy. Woz was the details guy. Successful business need both guys. If you don't have someone watching the big picture you get lost in the details. Just like if you don't have someone watching the details the big picture never becomes anything other than a pipe dream.
Was is this so hard for some people to understand?
I thought they had an agreement.
I'll tell you one thing, comparing Microsoft's C translation of their original Pascal version of messages to the simple, open, easy to understand and easy to debug Smalltalk version is very painful. And the layers of C++ over that don't help.
I bet .net still suffers from being opaque.
Didn't Woz do that himself?
I started the youtube. It starts with Jobs in the 80's saying that 5 year olds understand computers as well as he does.
I claimed he invented the computer, and it was the invention of the GUI that you latched on to?
*shakes head*
PS he didn't invent rounded corners, smartphones, icon grids, MP players *or* the computer either.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
woz is a has been. After the Apple 2 woz never designed anything worth mentioning. woz built over priced smart stereo remote controls that flopped and since his airplane crash he spent a portion of his fortune on concerts and computers for schools. Jobs continued to innovate after the Mac and Next and Pixar to the new Apple. he had the vision to guide talented engineers to built attractive useful products that made Apple the largest company in the world.
woz is a has been. After the Apple 2 woz never designed anything worth mentioning. woz built over priced smart stereo remote controls that flopped and since his airplane crash he spent a portion of his fortune on concerts and computers for schools. Jobs continued to innovate after the Mac and Next and Pixar to the new Apple. he had the vision to guide talented engineers to built attractive useful products that made Apple the largest company in the world.
"It's really odd you would pick as examples ONE aspect of Apple design which has served them quite well over the years"
Being 3 millimeters thinner served them HOW? Snake oil. They caused people a LOT of inconvenience and no one got anything in return.
Maybe you never really stressed your battery, having one of those external battery cases which is a bit like having external organs sticking out of your shirt.
The vacuum of consumer demand for computers was created and Steve Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
He's no more special than any other lottery winner.
XEROX, whose commercial computer system was a paperless WYSIWYG publishing environment supporting kerned fonts and even Asian languages like Japanese and whose programming environment used bitmapped kerned fonts and even italics.
As far as I know, the only agreement they had was an opportunity for Xerox to buy Apple stock in exchange for the demos.
Also, people like to give Jobs credit for going to Xerox, but it was Jef Raskin who knew about their research and convinced Steve to go for a visit.
Why was Jobs a member of the Homebrew Computer Club?
The only "genius" that ever existed at Apple was and is Steve Wozniak. The Apple I & II were miles ahead of the PC of the day in terms of innovation. Woz designed the circuit boards, wrote the OS, assembled it, tested it. Basically Woz WAS the Apple I & II.
Jobs was nothing more than a scheming, egotistical, slave driver. He took the credit while others did all the real work. Yes, Jobs had some influence over design but he didn't write any code. He couldn't write any code. He was the "idea" guy.
I suspect that Woz got sick of the corporate games that Jobs seemed to excel at.
Being 3 millimeters thinner served them HOW?
Lighter weight Apple devices that still hold a longer charge than most other devices is one of the many reasons Apple devices are so popular. Also simply put, they do feel good in the hand. I would question how much "inconvenience" this has caused. vs the good will everyday use of the devices that feel good to use has engendered. Overall it's a net win.
Again, it's funny what you claim it's a flaw is a feature every other company is chasing after now. Other companies produce even thinner devices than Apple now you know.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Utter bullshit. Utter bullshit. Utter bullshit.
A few millimeters of plastic or metal make no difference whatsoever, but the lack of a back that comes off deprives users of an obvious and valuable feature.
My current phone is a tiny Samsung the size of an iPhone 4. It really is the same size, which makes it dreadfully unhip now, and the back does come off. It's WAY thinner than it needs to be. What utility is it to be so thin? None whatsoever. Yet they managed to make the battery replaceable.
So now you have an iPhone so think that you can bend it. You deserve that. What a useless feature.
My older sister was in her late 60s and not at all tech savvy when she first encountered Linux.
The feel-good Linux conversion story is as old as Slashdot and always takes the same form. The convert is a close relation --- I am tempted to say "much older" and "dependent." The geek provides some hand-holding and free technical support--- and the happy ending is assured.
You never hear about the day when dear old Dad butt-kicked his evangelist son out the door and down the steps after he trashed a perfectly functional Windows system install and $1200 worth of heavily customized small business apps and PC games without asking.
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
Apple ][ dev here as well. My recollection from those days was that Woz was the engineer and Jobs was the salesman. From Mac days onward Jobs was the salesman and the designer in the look-and-feel sense, not in any technical sense.
While sales and look-at-feel are certainly important, when at a '83 trade show as a developer and returning to our booth and telling my buddies I just talked to "Steve" for a few minutes over at the Apple booth, they were excited. Then I confessed it was Jobs not Woz and the mood shifted to, eh, ok.
We certainly recognized that Jobs was essential to Apple's success, its just that we were engineers and the business/sales side held little interest for us. Again, post-Mac, our appraisal of Jobs improved due to his look-and-feel design work.
Apple also had at least two internal Mac OS replacement projects over the years. Neither getting close to where NeXT was.
What killed Lisa more than anything else was the $10K price tag. I got to use one a bit and it was quite useable, at least to an Apple ][ and very early Mac user.
he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow.
The kind who runs a convenience store in Alaska, and sells your standard bag of ice cubes?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I'm sure Wozniak does recall that quite vividly considering he hasn't done anything else since 1980 or so. Sinecures with the likes of Fusion IO don't really count. Too bad the guy can't just fade away gracefully.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
becuase they're geeks and (understandably, self-servingly) want to point how how central and important geeks are to, say, computing and technology hardware and software development, design, and production.
But it is one of the rarest geniuses on earth to be able to conduct a group of people to produce to their maximum potential, to be able to somehow lead talent to actually produce what the talent is capable of as a group and to do things that everyone else wants to do, but everyone else also falls short of time and time again.
The founding of Apple was really far less miraculous than the turnaround, when Jobs was able to get a huge bureaucracy to start making really high-quality, completely realized products without the significant compromises that everyone else took for granted. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro right now. For many years I used Thinkpads. There is a difference in the aesthetic, as is so often pointed out, but it's a difference that in the aesthetic of functionalism that has to be realized through design, logistics, manufacturing, etc. involving teams of many very smart people. The Macbook Pro isn't perfect, but it's a far superior machine to the Thinkpads I used to use, not because it's faster or has more features but because it has fewer flaws and compromises; it represents something far closer to a fully realized idea and goal.
The same thing goes for smartphones and tablets. I used to carry around Treos in the early 2000s. I used them heavily. They were my go-to tools. I wrote a book on a Treo, no kidding, riding on the subway every morning, that's still generating me about $20 in royalties a year (big money, heh). But I used them. The same thing for my Windows CE tablets, first a Vadem Clio and later a ViewSonic something-or-other. But they were exercises in taken-for-granted compromises. They were "as good as it gets," it takes a big company to design and make such things, and the end products, though flawed, were the best that could be accomplished. They were "hard problems" and "best-case solutions" as products. They worked well.
Or so everyone thought.
And then? iPhone. And iPad. And they set an entirely new bar and benchmark for their respective industries. The previous products were obsolete in a moment and everyone has struggled to catch up. Tim Cook has not been able to replicate this precisely because he does not have the particular genius that Steve Jobs had. That's not to say that other people inside Apple don't also have genuis of many varieties. Half of the people on Slashdot (okay, not half, but some) are probably geniuses in their own right, in algorithms, or some area of hardware engineering, or whatever.
That doesn't take away from the fact that Steve Jobs was a rare genius in management and leadership. He was the opposite of the pointy-haired boss. We make fun of the pointy-haired boss precisely because we realize that it is the norm. Jobs was not the clueless leader; he was the leader that always somehow managed to get it right and squeeze more great, historic, memorable, and compromise-free stuff out of the geniuses at his company, by far, than the vast majority of other leaders—even the highly regarded, very well paid ones—are able to ever come close to getting out of the geniuses at their own companies.
That's not nothing. And given the multiplier affect of getting the best out of many geniuses, it's quite a lot.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Woz Appled 1st.
that there is a difference between "marketing," "advertising," and "sales."
Marketing is tremendously important *at the stage of product design.* Marketing, when done profitably, means *understanding your market* (i.e. users) and what they need (which may or may not be what they think they want) and then ensuring that your engineers get wind of that need and design to it.
Good marketing is an integral part of good tech, and happens well before any advertising takes place. The best products may or may not sell themselves (I think there's a good argument to be made that people need to actually know about a product, and it needs to be available in channels, before they are able to realize that it exists and buy it), but the only way to *get* to the "best products" for a large audience is to have a very good marketing division helping engineering to understand just what "best" means for a large, diverse userbase.
Yes, Apple has been very good at marketing over the last two decades. This skill is inseparable from their ability to design, and the fact of their having designed and taken to mass production, rather good hardware that is in high demand.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
All of the following hardware from Apple has been absolutely groundbreaking/pathbreaking. When it came to market, there was nothing else like it:
- The original Mac 128k
- The Apple Newton
- The iMac
- The iPod
- The iPhone
- The iPad
Complaining that the Mac couldn't be expanded is like complaining that you can't rebore the cylinders on your Tesla to get more horsepower. These were products that changed users' understandings of the product space in question.
As a young geek, I cut my teeth on multiple computing systems. Three were old 8-bit systems: a C64, a TRS-80 CoCo2, and an Apple II. One was a Mac 128k. They were not even the same kinds of products. To call them all simply "computers" is ridiculous.
The same thing goes for:
Newton vs. other embedded "tablets" of the era (Fujitsu, IBM, GRiD, and others)
iMac vs. white-box PC
iPod vs. previous MP3 players or digital MiniDisc players
iPhone vs. previous smartphones like Treo
iPad vs. Windows CE "Handheld PC Pro" tablets
I can remember when everyone was making fun of the iPad for not including a stylus, a CF card slot, or a removable battery. And some geeks here continue to try to pretend that it was only a matter of advertising and image that caused consumers to gobble iPads up, and eventually, other companies (the entire Android field, for example) to essentially throw away any previous work and design to iPad specs and form factor.
But go ahead. Try it. Get someone a Viewsonic or Fujitsu tablet from 2009 and then hand them an iPad 1 and ask them which they prefer. Consumers aren't as stupid as people here make them out to be. They care about their hard-earned dollars just like everyone else. And they had no problem deciding that stylus-based resistive tablets with two hour batteries that were an inch and a half thick and two pounds (to accomodate replaceable batteries and removable storage) and that ran Windows... were not something they wanted to spend their money on.
Everyone here is quick to call it all "bullshit." Yet how many here own and use a tablet and/or a smartphone with a multitouch display and a purpose-specific operating system with a touch-oriented user interface? A lot, I'd bet, including many who mock such things as they peck out their mockings on an on-screen keyboard (which they also mock). Who brought these things from the halls of CERN to consumer electronics, not thinking that it was an impossiblility?
Apple under Jobs. Mock away.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Dangerous levels of Apple fanboyism detected!
Seriously dude, if you think Apple "killed the floppy drive and gave us USB" you need to spend less time reading Apple fanboy posts and more time learning a bit about the history of tech and how people work.
With regards to USB, Intel gave us USB. To be more correct Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel gave us USB. Those are the companies that got together to design it. Intel being the biggest driving force. Intel then implemented USB on its southbridge chipsets, and required that motherboards using them implement the ports.
It did not take off because Apple put it on Macs. That didn't hurt, of course, but had Apple used it and nobody else cards, well it would have languished and died out. It took off because it was a useful port and implemented on everything.
As for floppies, Apple did nothing to kill them. Getting rid of them on Macs only annoyed Mac users and lead to a bunch of USB floppy sales. Floppies died of their own accord as file sizes grew, making them less suitable, and as much better alternatives became affordable, mostly USB flash drives. The vast majority of systems continued to shop with floppy drives for years after Apple "killed" it, defacto evidence they did not in fact "kill" them.
Seriously, fanboys need to stop giving Apple credit for everything under the sun, it just looks silly.
That was obvious after he said with a straight face we where holding phones the wrong way.
What does the story of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and the personal computer reveal about what should be changed in the patent system? The Apple computers my kids bought were elegant, powerful and ultimately non repairable junk far before their time was over.
One thing you can say about the computer and cell phone business as of September 2015 is a computer or phone containing the elegant and best of all the patented refinements would cost a lot of money due to licensing fees. To design an elegant and best device from scratch would probably provoke enough patent infringement letters to take the fun out of the project.
My candidate for fixing the patent system is to limit licensing fees to 3x the cost of development.
I suggest the computer business is going through the same arc of creation, mass production, and mass mediocrity that the American automobile industry went through twice since WWI. The white box tower computer of the '90's is like the Model A Ford. Patents blocked European and Japanese makers from building automatic transmissions in the early '60s. Patents are blocking the webphone business I understand from the last few years of Slashdot.
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The first automotive revolution in the '20s was about materials and tools. The second automotive revolution starting in '49 was building cars for a population boom.I say mediocre to point out that Americans such as myself had no idea that even a V8 Studebaker Lark was pumping out CO2 that likely lingers in the atmosphere today.
I think that the "Apple" path in "Apple I & Apple II" was named by Job, is that true? it's 50 %
The timing of these comments is a bit off, goes both for Woz and the local crowd.
Also, it is quite common for serfs to call their lord 'asshole'. That's why they can't rise above their servitude. Could you all please be civil to the great personality, even if his personality was different from yours?
We have always known that Woz was the brains and the inventor and Steve Jobs was the salesman.
We have always known this, even when he hired other inventors he was always the sales man of the company.
... as far as an atheist can actually *have* a god.
The color video machinations and the RWTS routines were works of pure genius.
Oh yeah, the last good product Apple made was the IIe. Now get off my lawn.
Why do people always make out like Woz was a nice guy and Jobs was a dick?
"Prankster" is another word for being a dick. They were both dicks. Woz was a less photogenic dick than Jobs, but neither of them were people you'd want to be friends with.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
... but they are GREAT at marketing and making pretty looking products.
EVERY product they have ever come out with was made using existing technology, just packaged in a pretty container.
And people paid more because Apple did a great job at marketing.
There is nothing wrong with that, I won't deny Apple their ability to make tremendous profit margins.
Just stop saying their products are any better than other products.
They are just prettier.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
This is a rear case of an Edison and Tesla working together rather than apart.
Art imitating life.
Jobs was a dirt bag backstabbing sociopathic manipulator and if you think that sounds extreme then read the recent biographies of him. Same thing with guys like Eric Schmidt; relative to their companies and products, they're non-technical power seekers who are, uh, unburdened by the chains of conventional morality.
Ditto Larry Ellison. In the beginning Ellison himself characterized Oracle database as the cockroach motel of databases because "data goes in, but doesn't come out". Other people fixed it.
Jobs used to repeat other's people's ideas which were presented to him in meetings 10 minutes after they were presented to him at that meeting as if they were novel ideas he was just having in real time in front of the incredulous meeting atendees. They had a name for this- it was called the "Steve Jobs Warp Field".
In a startup convention a few years ago, the attendees were urged by the presenters to "don't waste your time learning about business". Who does that advice benefit? Not the attendees. All startup paticipants should learn about business and share what they learn most boradly.
The fact is, the world would be a very different place if normal people would take it upon themselves to undermine the careers of obvious sociopaths instead of letting them "lead".
They all ask him about the old days. This week there are TWO new Jobs movies- a documentary in general release and a biopic previewing at Telluride.
The reason Jobs was so driven to make the Macintosh was so he could lead a computer project so important that no single designer could dominate and the leader would be the important one. They both had wonderful accomplishments.
See, Musk fanboys don't know the meaning of 'innovation'.
Also, they fell for Musk's publicists' puffery. Yep, Musk fanboys got suckered by people with degrees in Communications. People who drank, played ball and fucked their way through school. People who use the words innovation and genius rather loosely.
Musk fanboys are morons.
You get the gasoline, Ill get the shovel!
...SNAP.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Woz is the reason the Apple ][ exists. Jobs is the reason you've heard of it.
Good job.
Of course, the important people were the business people...
Absolutely false. If you talk to venture capitalists and such they will tell you that people are far more important than ideas. A team that can take a good idea and turn it into a good product to put before a consumer is more important than anything else, including the good idea. Good teams are more rare than good ideas. The idea is secondary to the team according to venture capitalists.
The designers and engineers of Apple are far more important than the business people. To be clear, just because the business people are of secondary importance does not mean they are unnecessary and neither does it mean they do no make meaningful contributions to success. Important, but secondary.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmbwR9J6-Yw
Licensed the GUI components from Xerox, more like. The original Mac interface looked relatively little like the PARC interface.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Do you realize how dogmatic you sound? A few millimeters might make no difference to you, but other people like it. In contrast, most users don't want to take their phones apart, so something you think of as obvious and valuable is mostly unwanted.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Apple 1 and 2 were such low level hardware-centric designs that nothing could really be offered by a non-technical person like Jobs. Who is thinking there would be? These products are clearly "Pure Woz" from the design point of view. You could argue that Jobs' vision to exceed them into the Lisa/Mac were where Jobs came in.
I'll just copy and paste; maybe the second time someone will actually address the actual point:
If he had any input, from the packaging to the color scheme of the keyboard, he could accurately have claimed to be on the design team. When did he claim to be a technical engineer? When did Jobs hold something up and say "hey, I invented this widget in the lab that powers that gizmo"?