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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.
I'm sure we already all knew it, but it is good to hear it come from him for once.
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.
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!
It is, but Steve Jobs was/still is a fashion statement, a billboard, and he was good at it, obviously.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that
au contraire mon ami... He invented a style that makes billions. Do not be so hasty in judgement.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I am sure Woz has already been compensated quite well for his contributions. He provided the engineering and Jobs made sure more than 10 people knew it existed. I think the collaboration worked out just fine for both of them.
Yes, we knew Jobs had an over-inflated ego. That came out long before his death.
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?
Did Woz design the Apple II without any involvement from Jobs? Of course. But Jobs actually went out and sold the thing, and he made both of them rich. True, it's hilarious the way the media portrays Jobs as some sort of computer design demigod, but the actual role he played wasn't zero.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
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.
Considering how Apple nearly died when Steve was gone, and became the most profitable company on the planet after he returned, it's obvious that he did something.
Basically, Jobs was no engineer at all, he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow. A technology company needs both. Most companies aren't going to get far if they can't figure out how to sell stuff to customers, but a tech company also needs technology to sell, meaning you need engineers to make it.
I don't think any of this stuff is a revelation. Steve was obviously gifted with being able to market and sell stuff, and probably also at being able to know what kind of things *would* sell well and what wouldn't, and maybe some very high-level direction for changes to be made to sell things. The engineers like Woz are the ones who actually made everything happen though.
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
He both doomed and fixed apple.
He doomed it with the meandering that went on for years. By the time he came back he actually had an idea how to run a lean business. Cut the crap sell the good stuff. Bill Gates did something similar at MS. It is why balmer failed. He tried to do everything. Instead of 'here is the narrow line of stuff we sell' (sideways to the engineers MAKE IT REALLY GOOD).
Even phones and tablets he was reluctant to enter that market. There are plenty of videos showing that. Why? Other companies were coming out with 'decent' tablets and getting 0 traction. The cheap netbook craze showed that 'yeah there could be a market for this' *at the right price*.
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?
ANY fool can be a "marketing genius", doesn't take brains.
So. You're a millionaire, are you? Thought not.
Au contraire, mon cher, he did not invent a style, if at all his designers invented it for him. Big difference.
Yes, his designers...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I suppose this is one of the few cases where ego size is justified because of the low air pressures at the heights his technical achievements brought him into.
By your logic, the US Patent Office should get the credit for Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
On this Labor Day, you should know better than most that labor precedes capital.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
This. People idolize Jobs so much that they forget that he was the reason that Apple nearly failed altogether in the first place. He was just the right guy in the right place, when Apple started, and then later when they acquired NeXt and he lead them a second time. He's hardly the brilliant tactician that people seem to think he is, he simply had a vision that fit Apple when it was at its worst, but then nearly burned them to a crisp. In a way they're probably fortunate that he is no longer with us, because it's clear that Apple wasn't being steered amazing well in his later years, but was rather coasting on past glories yet again.
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.
You know who else knows how to "make them want something"? Drug dealers and prostitutes.
Happy Labor Day.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a designer, people like jobs are whom you smash your ideas on like the shore, till it's exactly what the boss wants. Yes that is my design, yes I made all the changes and styled it, but the boss won't let it go any further till it looks how he wants it.
You know, nobody does anything, it's all hired out. So, fine, did he put the team together, or is he really just a mannequin? I don't know..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Damn it, now I want to take Jobs' side.
Correct. I did the engineering brain work to design the Apple ][ but Jobs productized it and sold it. His productization, like a plastic housing, was very important to the usability of that product. He did excellent marketing of it. Even though it wasn't his conception, it was his only major business success at Apple until his return. The monies it earned allowed Jobs to create the Apple ///, LISA, Macintosh and NeXT cube. I think the marketing and execution errors of those products were largely due to Jobs wanting to make himself a leader and often rushing products out too fast with poor marketing judgements, despite the fact that he spokes as the marketing genius. When he returned he took time and didn't share the iPhone with Bill Gates in advance. He got the product done the right way and it was very good because it was for himself too, not outsiders, a market that would make him money. It had to be good enough for him to use.
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."
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.
Jobs said, in a lecture at Stanford, that his exposure to typography in college was the reason beautiful variable width fonts existed in Apple's OS and later, all computers due to copying by other OS vendors. I bet Woz had little to do with the UI of the Mac since he was mostly a hardware guy. And Macs have the best UI (except Yosemite, which is quite meh) thanks to Jobs... even Microsoft can't compete in that area.
If Jobs did nothing, how come there hasn't been a decent new product from Apple since his passing away? Apple released OS X, MacBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad under Jobs.
Well, he did enable the NEXT computers. Maybe that was more Avie Tevanian than Steve Jobs, but Jobs was what caused anybody to notice NEXT in the first place. So I wouldn't think that Jobs had NO role in the success of the Apple I & II
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
Apple would have collapsed even if Jobs stuck around. It was a company that grew too big, too fast. It was a feeding ground for people with grand ideas and even more grandiose egos. Like many of it's contemporaries, it was doomed to fall.
Jobs' return was a different story, but a lot can still be attributed to luck. To Jobs credit, he was a more mature businessman and he reentered at a time when Apple realized that it had to be more humble. He probably would have saved the company regardless of what happened. Yet there was a lot of luck. Things like the iPod were initially directed at Apple's existing customers. The growth that it triggered and the products that it enabled were far from a bygone conclusion.
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.
I'm not sure why parent is modded down. Paying a measly monthly salary for designing stuff where said stuff makes millions for years or decades is a prime example of capitalists ripping off creative employees.
Woz should get royalties for every Apple II sold.
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.
And Michael Spindler as well.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
"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.
Nobody is claiming he didn't have a role in Apple 2's success, just that he didn't do any of the engineering. Like many others, I thought that fact was already well known.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Yet there was a lot of luck.
There was no luck. Anyone with half a brain knew that OS9 was shit and tanking fast. They needed something better and fast, they had no time to start from scratch. They hired back Jobs because he basically forked Mac OS and re-wrote it correctly as Next OS. With just a little work Next OS became OSX and suddenly apple can sell real computers with real operating systems on them. no magic, no luck. just pure engineering skill.
He couldn't find a 1 bit error dispersion dither pic of it, let alone an Apple II version.
You've got to be kidding me. You're comparing the Chop-O-Matic to the iPhone, and calling the former "technology"???
People likely abhor Popeil because of the general disdain for telemarketing and infomercials, plus they don't see how his products have improved anyone's lives substantially. Whereas, rightly or wrongly, they attribute smartphones to Steve Jobs and those really have changed peoples' lives in an undeniable way.
Heck, I had to look up Popeil on Wikipedia to see who you were talking about since I didn't recognize the name, and I certainly couldn't think of any of his inventions offhand. Everyone knows what an iPhone is.
Worthles? He was probably the richest pimp who ever lived.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why was Jobs a member of the Homebrew Computer Club?
People likely abhor Popeil because of the general disdain for telemarketing and infomercials,
Popeil was a whiz with injection plastic molding, he knew how to get it done fast and on the cheap. Certainly his marketing was way over the top, but his products are a good study in how to get products to market quickly at low cost.
You know who else knows how to "make them want something"? Drug dealers and prostitutes.
Happy Labor Day.
This is a simple rule for any business but thanks for sharing your experiences.
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.
By your logic, the US Patent Office should get the credit for Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Are you saying that Einstein paid the US patent office to develop the Theory of Relativity for him and then took credit for someone elses work?
Either way you answer, it demonstrates you've got no idea what you're on about.
Steve Jobs regularly stole credit for the work of others by passing it off as his own.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
NeXTstep is not a fork of Mac OS. In retrospect I have been thinking that Blue Box on NuKernel might have been a good starting point, the idea being that the Mac OS code and apps will eventually be ported to run outside the Blue Box in separate processes.
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
I think you're misunderstanding me by 180 degrees. The GP's comment seemed to indicate that since the work was done by "his (Jobs') designers" that he deserves the credit.
I agree that Steve Jobs regularly took credit for other people's work. And regarding the Einstein, it was just meant to demonstrate that just because someone's giving you a paycheck doesn't mean that they deserve credit for your work (even though it's part of the landscape now).
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did Woz design the Apple II without hardware app notes? I've never read any reference designs from the 70's (or even know if there was such a thing back then), but how close would an apple be to a basic 6502 reference design?
I was with you until you ran down the Woz.
We Apple nerds admire the fuck out of Woz, even as we are genuflecting at the altar of Jobs.
You know the 'back in my day' competitions, where everyone has a hardship story, until one neckbeard joker says, "I had a 1 button keyboard, and I pounded in ones to make computer code. Couldn't afford 2 buttons, so I had to make my own zeros from scratch..."
And you look up, and it's fucking Woz, it's no joke, and he really figured out how to do that shit. Bite Me.
As mentioned, NeXT was not a fork of Mac OS. The other choice at the time was Beos as the replacement for OS9 which would have made an interesting parallel future if it happened.
I'm old enough that I think of Jobs as the guy who almost killed Apple. I can still hear the echo of him saying "Apple II forever" as he milked it to death in favour of the stripped down Lisa. It was hard to sell a 32 bit computer with a graphical UI and only 128 KBs of memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
I had a business in college and never made any money until I hired a salesperson. After which I made a lot of money. But most of it went to pay him (I'm a tech guy).
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.
Avie Tevanian was one of the more important software engineers at NeXT, but he wasn't the only one. He wasn't one of the NeXT founders, he was hired after NeXT was started.
Yeah, but Jobs didn't invent any technology either. Ron Popeil did invent products himself - cheap plastic products but still, creative. Jobs was a salesdrone, through and through.
Frankly, with your low-ish userID, I'm shocked you had look up Ron Popeil - did you not have a TV as a kid or something? Have a strict early bedtime and so never had the TV on when the late-night infomercials started?
Heck, Weird Al did a song about him. Please tell me you know who Weird Al is?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Woz's design was genius level work, things like an RLL floppy controller while others were using FM or MFM, or FSK to tape (ack). Computer designs back then were dead simple, no reference designs needed for conventional work. Designing with the 6502 was particularly easy.
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One more critical item: VisiCalc. Without the "killer ap", Apple's story would have been much different.
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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.
What did I say? US? Oops. Thanks for straightening me out on my patent offices.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I watched my very first real time video on the NeXT sometime in the late 80's. It was a 3x3" window of the Lunar lander coming up to a rendezvousing with the CM. Up until this time, the only graphics I'd ever seen on a computer were 16 color images that took a few seconds to draw on screen. The next also had mathematica which was an amazing tool for solving semi impossible integrals at the time. I felt like I'd just wasted $40 on Gradshteyn and Ryzhik.
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.
Of course I know who Weird Al is; I remember when "Even Worse" was brand new, but I never wasted time watching infomercials. If I stayed up late, I was either watching Johnny Carson or doing something on my computer.
Yes, Jobs was a salesdrone, but he helmed the company when it made the iPod and the iPhone, two phenomenally successful products. That's what he's going to be remembered for. Those products will be in museums (if they aren't already). Ronco products will not. Unfortunately, the nature of our society is that the corporate leaders are the ones who are remembered, and they're almost never engineers (and in fact, when engineers have headed companies, the results have usually been not that great). So the engineers who make the products are never remembered by name (except for Wozniak, a big exception, though even here most people-on-the-street probably won't recognize his name the way they would Jobs'), while the salesCEOs who peddled their products are.
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.
Your description helps explain why the early Macintosh was successful in the artist and high end consumer market. For most businesses doing routine computer work, "pretty" was irrelevant and low cost essential, which is why the IBM clones won in that arena.
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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
This was all out long before Jobs died... long before Woz even left Apple, for that matter.
If it hadn't been for Jobs, the Apple computer company may not have ever existed, but that isn't because Jobs helped design the computer, it is because Steve Jobs, Wozniak's good friend at the time, had the business savvy that Woz lacked to make it commercially successful.
Jobs played a pivitol role in the creation of the company, but not the computer.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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
just because someone's giving you a paycheck doesn't mean that they deserve credit for your work (even though it's part of the landscape now).
Very often it's in the contract. I don't know his particular case, but a work for hire usually doesn't get a lot of credit. So, what's the deal? Was Jobs hired by a modeling agency, or did he contribute something way back?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
No, Spindler was long after Jobs left. Scott, Markkula and Scully were the first three CEO's, and Jobs left during Scully's term after losing a ham-fisted attempt to oust Scully. THEN you get Spindler, and then Amelio before Jobs assumes the interim role of CEO, eventually dropping the "interim".
Woz isn't some struggling engineer. He made a fortune from co-founding Apple both in pay and stock options. Last I heard, he is still a paid employee of Apple ("Apple Ambassador", or something like that) receiving ~$120k a year according to Wikipedia.
He has been very well compensated.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Revisionist history here? NeXT had nothing to do with the Macintosh system software until the company was bought out by Apple. It is an entirely different design that is intended for an entirely different customer base. Getting NeXT to run on Macs and to provide compatibility for existing Mac software was a non-trivial process that took place internally then across many years of public releases. Indeed, there was very little consensus about which version of OS X was ready to be the true successor to the classic system software. (Tthe debate seemed to settle down around 10.3 or 10.4.)
As for Mac OS 9 being "shit", it had one thing that early versions of OS X didn't: application support. Commercial developers were not keen on OS X in the early days simply because OS X users were a subset of the users on a platform that offered a tiny market share. (Existing users may have wanted the improvements of OS X as well, but application software is king.) While developers would appreciate the technical improvements to OS X, the early API was incomplete. All of that was resolved with time, but it took years to resolve.
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.
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.
Woz's design of the Apple II was nothing like what was described in the MOS Technology 6502 app notes or the KIM-1 SBC. The Apple II was based on a unified memory sub-system capable of time-division-multiplexed color video refresh and 6502 R/W. It also had decoded slots and an Integer BASIC interpreter. All Woz's unique design, and very different from most typical computer logic designs of that era.
You get the gasoline, Ill get the shovel!
...SNAP.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Good job.
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
Apple had started from scratch, and wound up using NeXT instead. I don't know why Rhapsody never came out, but it didn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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"?