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Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done (theregister.co.uk)
Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
Someone honest.
Sure, this is great and he can say it
And get away with it
But the rest of us work out in the real world
At real jobs with real bosses
And we cant just say "fuck it and fuck your bullshit, I'm heads down working"
Linus: Curmudgeon Edition
Well yeah, how many unique inventions/idea does Linus have? He doesn't have any idea what it takes to innovate, does he?
Yet Linux is full of innovation. Did anyone think where it comes from?
Linus perspires when he codes? Ewwww
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. "
-Thomas A. Edison (Privileged White Dude & Climate Denier...) l
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
No matter what the talking heads say about STEM and giving equal opportunity to all. It take real skill, dedication and talent to be a real innovator. Luck comes later.
Similar to screenwriting. You can have all the ideas in the world, but if you can't get it down on paper, it doesn't make a damned difference.
Get with the times - you have to be disruptive now.
Linux is a re-implementation of innovation that happened in the 1970s.
There is nothing innovative about Linux.
Linus should shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.
I have held that belief for a long time but now someone with credentials said it out aloud.
It just so happens that all these tech businesses ended up in one place, garner all the investments (funded by Americans from all over via wall street) whenever a new fad hits the fan such as the dot com, E-commerce, mobile etc. When they try to start fads nobody wants, they fall flat ( as many have done) and others are turned into partial success by diverting huge investor money (from all over the world) to those worhtless projects.
Innovation is "invention without a tangible outcome." Make something real.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/07/08/linus_torvalds_flips_the_bird.jpg
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation. 'The real work is in the details'
As is often the case, Linus presents his rather myopic view thinking that it applies to all of IT. There's no doubt that there is an awful amount of bullshit going around in IT on the subject of innovation. It may also be true that many successful projects only have a 1% innovation component in them, but those are probably not very innovative projects. Such projects actually tend not not spend a lot of time on details, certainly not at first, because that's not where you succeed or fail; you need to understand which details are important and focus only on those. If you think innovation is just another project that needs getting done, then you don't understand what innovation is. For starters, a good innovator knows which ideas to pursue, what to turn into a POC or a project, how to evaluate those projects on an ongoing basis, and when to quit. And if you, as an innovator, never quit and bring all your projects to conclusion and launch, then you are most likely not casting your nets wide enough.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
managers / owners do the least and get, by far, the most. meanwhile, the lowest grunts do the hardest stuff, and get the least
unethical lack of real payment for labor is why we as a society so often fail
I picked it up, turned it upside down, and shook it. That's how I roll. Deal.
extra-cheasy pizza with hotdogs ontop in-between games of high-speed rap^H err pingpong and JayZ spirit-cooking^H err spiritual rap music while table tennis.
Duke Nukem-esque developer attitude, still more productive than Steve "if it takes too long then unplug and write it again" Jobs.
between those that do and those that don't, is that some people do and some people don't. It's as true in software as it is in any other walk of life. You can't think your way from A to B. You have to walk there.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
totally obvious to any half-way observant person.
....) than people wandering around talking about be "entrepreneurs" , and "creatives", with this shit-faced superiority that only ignorance and inexperience can produce.. Most (98%+) of end up failing, spectacularly, because they think all the value is in the idea, rather than the implementation of the idea. Reality shows us, 99.999999% of the value is in the implementation of the idea, the idea is nearly worthless.
All innovation is simply a series of very small steps. All "discoveries" or "inventions" are at their root, fairly minor enhancements to existing knowledge or craft.
Sure, sometimes those minor enhancements were not at all obvious to anyone except the exceptional person (or team) who made them, but, once the enhancement is announced, it's completely obvious, to anyone willing to analyse it, how it rests on all the past development.
I challenge anyone to find an example of any discovery, invention or other innovation which does not fall into this rule.
Nothing annoys me more (well, not many things anyway, dirty dishes, unmade beds,
I think this is what Linus would say if he had conferred with me first.
Steve Jobs: “REAL ARTISTS SHIP”
But details are hard and require knowing stuff, brah. Not. For. Meeeee...
Seriously though, agree totally, but are all those VCs and angels really so brain dead as to not know this? Or are they, like the finance folks capitalizing on herd movement into the stock markets at the moment, just cashing in on the phenomenon until it implodes? I suspect the only ones who aren't in on the joke are the dimwits who genuinely believe their brilliant calorie/counting-or-messaging/Youtube/mashup-or-whatever phone app is going to change the world, and they aren't going to pay much attention to cranky ol' Linus.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.
Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.
And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.
It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.
nothing new since Minix.
Only thing he technologically accomidayed was Transmeta for the stifled Crusoe processor architecture (the arch that should have been in every Android phone from the get-go), and he gave props to the true Workstation ip-theft American computing architecture DEC Alpha. Other than that, Linus should have been working for Nokia and not an H1B in United States.
Good for him, I completely empathize. There is far, far too much of this sort of 'talk' that never amounts jack but for the loudmouths in the industry pocketing ridiculous numbers of dollars. Bravo!
If we look at what's usually called "innovation", it's often really about market acceptance. The first iPhone didn't involve any technology that was unique or special by itself; it was just a combo of features and decent implementation that caught on with the public: knowing what to keep, what to cut, and how to package it all together.
There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around, such as my pet, dynamic relational, but until somebody implements a version that actually catches on with the industry, it won't go anywhere.
Building a practical version would indeed take a lot of Torvalds-style sweat. There are probably roughly a hundred times more interesting ideas than there are good implementors. A Torvalds-like grinder deciding to work on dynamic-relational has a slim chance.
By "interesting", I mean something that has a curious angle or variation that may seem odd or even impractical up-front, but worth exploring in order to kick the tires and tune. It often takes more than one try to get it right. A lot of now-common ideas had early versions that didn't do enough correctly to catch on in the market, sometimes because the hardware hadn't quite caught up.
The Apple Newton is one example; as is arguably the Xerox Star, the first GUI computer; and even RDBMS took more than a decade to take off, despite early promising experiments.
By some accounts, the early relational languages were too "mathy", and Dr. Codd was not good at communicating the benefits to non-academia. SQL made it more approachable. I won't claim SQL is the ideal, by far, but was good enough to catch on in IT shops, being more like COBOL than like math. Several different relational languages and experimental RDBMS were created to explore relational query languages and implementations. This gave the market and entrepreneurs enough sub-ideas to pick and choose from to make something sell-able.
It wasn't a straight line.
Table-ized A.I.
1% mission plan.
99% H1B.
It's so true. The people in SV that actually do the work are the ones that control the things they make or design. The rest is hot air and people showing up for free lunch.
I wandered into some echo-box on Twitter where a bunch of old farts were being roused into a rabble by some liberal journalist talking about how we need basic / universal income now because soon the robots will take away our jobs and life will be pristine, prosperous, and without war.
I called the journalist out on talking a lot of shit, in response to which he just talked more shit. To quote: "the machines will pay us". I had to point out a few things:
1. Technology is a tool, not a participant.
2. If your big solution involves convincing everyone it will work before it exists, using odd language, it probably won't work.
3. If your method of convincing others your idea is sound is to ask them how it's supposed to work in lieu of rebuttle against criticism, it probably isn't sound.
But then his slew of fogies piped up. "What does not make sense is the current system. Real value supports life. Principle of doing no harm= Equality." "lol, it is simple math, do it yourself." And, "citizens income. We will have to get used to more leisure, half jobs, no war just war movies".
No real substance, just pie in the sky rhetoric.
If I hadn't been blocked by the journalist I would go back there and paste this article. Torvalds is right, talking a bunch of shit doesn't get anything done in engineering, or anything else that is and/or that verges on technical including government.
(Unless, of course, you're a liberal arts major.)
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It's round! It rolls! You could use it to transport things! I think I'll call it...the wheel.
Example: I just saw a presentation involving a new ORM framework today - same old idea, same crappy ORM efficiency, why am I supposed to be impressed? How many ORM frameworks do we need? They all do the same damned thing, and all of them do it badly. By the time you have the latest and greatest innovative framework working in your project (having had to mangle to your architecture to compensate for the horrible inefficiency), you could have achieved the same end - cleaner, faster, and with less code - by doing without the framework.
Pick your topic: development methodologies, programming languages, frameworks, whatever: The whole IT branch seems to have institutional amnesia. Each new generation of programmers (i.e., every 5-10 years) rediscovers it all, plasters on new buzzwords, and pats themselves on the back for their cleverness. /rant
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
More trite bits of ancient wisdom but change the words and idiots think he's a philosopher. Yes Linus marketing hype is bullshit, now get back to your keyboard.
Linus Torvalds, the Frank Zappa of programmers.
This industry is full of bullshit and fads.
Innovation, invention and discovery are certainly important and can allow us to more easily or efficiently address needs, but when we are talking about "innovation" or innovative people most of the time what we are really talking about is creative problem solving using already existing methods, knowledge and technology.
It is easy to look at IT and see how real innovations have contributed to a transformation of many aspects of society over the last half century and then fall into the cult of innovation as a sort of belief in perpetual innovation as a means for the betterment of society. But both a longer view and more critical view of our day to day society should confirm the importance of understanding that you already have many of the technological tools and methods needed to address today's needs. And a good application of those already known technological tools and methods should be the priority of problem solving rather than innovation merely for the sake of innovation.
Surely there is always a need for innovation, especially in medicine where virus are constantly evolving to maximize their contagion and our existing tools need to be adapted to new challenges. But in other technology areas the problem domain does not change as remarkably over time. And already developed technology is well suited for most day to day challenges.
Sure you can probably cite a thousand different examples where today's technology is inadequate to a problem or need, but I think the point is that it is no less noble or worthy to address the tens of thousands of those other problems and human needs that can be worked on without the need for any fundamental innovation.
why do you think the syntax is seerial tube aka colon(semi) and it began with mathematics and print or wrute statements.
Or are you confusing language with (.h)header files with (.o)object files and libraries with a manual debugger and compiler and libraries of an appendix?
C existed in mechanical form first, write under your nose. Like Pascal and Fortran, just someone else's point of view on Time in Motion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What else would you expect somebody whose only claim to fame is to build a knockoff of proper UNIXes to say? LOL
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success? Most "rank and file" employees only care about the paycheck, or doing the little piece of the whole puzzle they're hired to do. If something bad for the company but good for them happens, they're probably pleased about it. The business owner who created it as his "baby" from the ground up? Not so much.
Torvalds is right, IMO, embracing Edison's quote. The people who pretend it's not so are just the ones at the top who can take all the credit for that 99% perspiration of others they hired to implement an idea.
The problem is not innovation itself, but more what we're defining as innovation.
When a person can act like a complete fucking idiot on YouTube and amass a billion look-at-this-dumbass clicks resulting in a six-figure salary, I'd say that says a lot about what is "innovative" today. Don't even get me started on reality TV.
The scary part is watching Wall Street get high as a kite off the innovation fumes as they drool over shit like Snapchat, who loses hundreds of millions every year and arrogantly brags how they may never become profitable, defying all common sense with a multi-billion dollar IPO valuation.
Not that we have any.bomb evidence of what happens when bullshit infects innovation...
Agreed, Mr. T.: I say it all the time on /. home of BLOWHARD bullshitters galore! E.G. Khyber https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10245269&cid=53880349/
* He's MORE than WELCOME to backup his blowhard bullshit (but he NEVER ever does & spouts MORE horseshit than anyone else on this forums, no joke...).
World's FULL of "Chattering dolt" types that are "ne'er-do-well" gasbag blowhards. Any FOOL can talk.
APK
P.S.=> There are LOADS of "talk, talk, talk" bullshitters out there but VERY FEW doers (but YOU'RE 1 of them & so am I via APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ & most here? Are NOT & massive talkers (nothing more))... apk
It's all about the incentives. That's why so many people like to talk about innovation:
1). For innovation, even if it is only the appearance of innovation, or a new and more convenient packaging of something existing, you can charge more. There is a price premium on new products or anything that looks exciting or with some better value-added;
2). Some highly productive new technology areas are known as innovators. Thus "innovation" itself has become like a meta-brand. It's seen like a holy grail of business, you can't be against innovation, innovation is the best!
3). Innovation has a low bar of entry. It didn't always used to be this way but now it is. Nearly anyone can hang out a shingle, call themselves an "entrepreneur" and an "innovator", and raise buckets of money. Some people of little talent and excessive ambition have noticed this and try to become important this way. All you have to do is have a polished patter, make lots of references to "elevator pitches", "disruptive innovation", and "burn rates" and you can sound like a VC genius. Real geniuses are rare, BS is common;
4). For all that, when real innovation happens, it's magic. New companies, new markets, value is created, and earned fortunes are possible. Lives can be changed.
So Linus says "everyone is stupid but me" because "they should all stop self-aggrandizing".
Um... maybe he should take his own advice and stfu about how much better he is than other tech people?
>> "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details."
>> Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.
this is because Linux took 99% of its innovation from others and then had the 1% kernel.
comment directly in my journal
You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.
He didn't do that. He paid others to do it for him. Any patents his employees came up with he took sole credit for. Edison was the first tech industry MBA.
I love this man.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
"Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb."
That is not a characteristic of having Asperger's, it's called determination.
when linus was a nice guy?
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
It's a fine line between determination and stubbornness..
When is Linux "Done"?
Cause it's not done yet in my view (I'm looking at you real-time, video and audio quirks... even SDCard issues with VFat).
Tech promotion is dependent on getting the work done. The promotion provides the initial funds to pay those salaries... free is not free (as in beer!)--maybe for Linus, but not the rest of us.
Linus doesn't have the talent to invent a new OS. No surprise that he disparages the idea of innovation altogether.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Linus is now officially my hero.
captcha: amenable
The word innovation has been overused to the point where it no longer has any meaing whatsoever.
Most of the industry is cyclical and evolutionary rather than revolutionary or disruptive.
I'm getting up there in years and witnessed lots of IT fads. The average seems to be that only 1 out of 10 such fads has significant staying power: it becomes mainstream and common.
3 out of 10 find narrow niches where they do fairly well, and 6 out of 10 pretty much die, often because they were no good or too similar to something already around.
Table-ized A.I.
Linus is a douche. Next question.
As much as I like technology, Linus is right. It is self-serving.. Instead of helping you: Our daily life gets harder as time passes on, with to much more information demanded from you, more means to monitor you at work, and a ton of mail to process when you get home.
Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration. Sound familiar? :-) I had an idea for computer systems that could adapt to their environments without programming (the 1% part). After 5+ years of hard work and experimentation, I had it into production! Even got a US Patent for it. So, I think the 1% vs 99% stuff is pretty correct. :-) BTW, if you have a device with a chip in it, disc drive, or flat panel display, that software probably built it! I agree with Linus in that innovation doesn't come at the push of a button. First you need to understand your domain, and then you may be able to start seeing around the corners.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I understand privacy. That decision was good. I hope the court does not set a precedent to personal filming in public.
You can run a company without illegally parking in a handicapped space and buying a new car every week so you don't need to get a real license plate tied to your name. Yes, Steve was a jerk above and beyond running the company. When you're constantly screwing over other people, you tend to get further in life. And if you do something interesting, people will defend you no matter what.
http://softwareengineeringmca....
A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success?
And don't forget other jerks spreading misinformation when they don't get along. I have seen people ganging up against one guy to bring him down despite he being super talented and done nothing wrong.
Is it possible that Linux is being jealous or envious of the attention on all the exciting hot new technologies of AI, machine learning, robots, drones, self driving cars and what not while he is stuck with the dusty rusty old world of beaten-to-death problems in OS design and development?
I mean all the bright kids these days want to work in AI and deep learning. Working on OS design would be a death wish for young hotshot researchers and developers.
How about an article on innovative billing practices? Yes, I'm a CenturyLink customer.
Steve Jobs was the first one I thought of when I saw Torvald's quote. People basically worship him for having some simple ideas (or I guess more likely picking the best of other people's ideas).
Political correctness flows from ideology. Various interest groups will push their version of history and truth forward to service their own agenda. If you have enough critical mass in society, then your voice is heard. Agendas are arbitrary. Some you may agree with, some you reject (examples, vaxxers, anti-vaxxers, make america geat again, BLM, affirmative action to get women and minorities into tech, there are so many).
There are some very politically incorrect truths that no amount of political spin is going to change. My favourite is how to get women into technology positions. There are underlying reasons why --- by and large --- tech companies are heavily loaded with men, european and asian men. Those groups have an interest and some talent in math. Over here at Slashdot, we are full of people who love math. In the rest of the world, people are viscerally afraid of math. They will do anything to avoid doing it, they dont' like it, they don't want to have to do it, they don't understand it, and they are desperately afraid that someone will come along and expose their dirty little secret: they are REALLY bad at math, or worse, they are numerically dyslexic. I know several people, including a lawyer and an english professor, who have admitted that they not only can't do math, (just basic arithmetic, on their fingers), but basically, they have a pathological explanation: their brains are not wired for numbers. Ouch. Numbers move around on the page for them. There's no program, course, or teacher who could move them into numeracy.
So now lets get down and dirty. Computer programmers are, even the "talented" and competent ones, by and large, rule followers. Most people in our industry that I have worked closely with DO NOT attempt to analyze problems from first priciples but instead immediately look for examples and design patterns. A shift towards design pattern, imho, has been good for the industry as a whole. Why reinvent the wheel, etc. Most programmers I have worked with think in terms of the tools they were taught. In our case, the tools are: language x,y,z and design patterns.
I can't tell you the number of times my staff came to me and said that the thing I wanted them to do was technically impossible. In software development, you are confronted with "technically impossible" frequently. In most cases, after more research, theorizing, and testing those theories ( in code) these "technically impossible" problems were surmountable.
Bottom lines: creativity is rare. people are scared to go down roads that they can't see the end of, hence the extreme dependence on design patterns-- you know what a design pattern is for. Innovation is a rare convergence of multiple factors. Could it be taught? Not really. Yes, and no.
Look at the various flavours of software design and implementation that have been inflicted on us. There are many titles, software designers, architects, developers, programmers, sw engineers. There are many methodologies. But the bottom line persists: software development hasn't changed that much over 30 years. The same problems are constantly coming up, and the use of design patterns hasn't changed that. There has been a rush to get non-math people to learn programming. What you get is people who know 1 thing, 1 tool, then they turn around and try to solve all problems using those things. To a man with a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Agile tried to incorporate the realities of running a software dev project into the methods, but many people don't really feel it, and then they try to work around the methodology. In the end Agile doesn't improve quality, time to market, or... anything.
You can't teach innovation to rule followers. You can't make (good) programmers out of people who don't have aptitude for algebra. 20 years from now the makeup of the tech workplace will be at most incrementally different than today.
Note: the best designers that I have come across (in the software development world) are architects. Real architects, the ones who design buildings. Why? Because they can think in abstract terms, they are not restrained by thinking in terms of tools.
Could be a scumbag
the coding is still going to be fun for me as long as I'm solving problems and just typing lines of code, and sitting with an upstraight back
*percent
it's 99% "project management" (as well as something called "process management"), 1% work.
At least that's how the suits see it.
Too bad many of these "jerks and asses" were just really good at ripping off other peoples' ideas and burying the evidence. They were more salesmen than innovators.
Git has a poor user interface and is badly documented, in my opinion.
See my subject: WEAK! I don't always agree w/ Mr. T. either, e.g. his thoughts on Pascal & my response https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10204455&cid=53806455/ DUMB to use C in kernels (makes everyone dumb) & yes, you can determine null term'd strlength via sending 2 pointers thru a string, 1 double the size of the other. When the larger errs out you have a midpoint. Double it, you have length (IsOdd/IsEven test required, on odd subtract 1). It's some work & work you do NOT have to do using Pascal (has string length built into strings which is WHY it doubles C++ in strings (& math too)).
His error on labels in Pascal is WRONG too (but we do agree GoTo is OK if you go 1 direction, down & out, for any labels calling it to a SINGLE exit label out of a proc/function)
APK
P.S.=> Pitiful dolts wasting your time & lives 'chattering' on /. when you could be improving the world's lot as I do (Mr. T. too) - but then again, YOU have to have skills to do it - you clearly DON'T (it's YOUR fault for being wastes of LIFE)... apk
Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.
This comment is rated 5, Insightful. HA. Only on the new /. I guess...
Steve Jobs is a talentless douche. Great marketer, no question, but a talentless douche. His only REAL donation to the modern desktop is his pushing for good fonts back in the classic mac days. Oh, and "curvy" rainbow coloured boxes instead of the beige dried-vomit of the time.
The Woz, the wizard of the pair, is on record (his own site) saying Jobs was never a dev. For giggles ask how many people that think Jobs was a genius if he was also a dev, In my experience it's near 100%.
And the bringing back Apple for the dead? Not without a donation of millions directly from Bill Gates himself. Forgot that didn't you. And it's wasn't Apple /computers/ that saved Apple, it was iTunes. Apple computers and hardware is, even according to Woz himself, no long innovative.