
Steve Wozniak Still Doesn't Quite Get Why Steve Jobs Was a Genius - t3ra
http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-just-proved-he-has-no-idea-what-steve-jobs-was-al.html?
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tyingq
Better headline: Writer Still Doesn't Quite Get What Wozniak Values.

Also, some unfair cherry picking here, like:

 _" Woz got his facts slightly wrong--it's not only the watchbands that differ
from a less expensive to more expensive Apple Watch, it's also the case
itself. In the more expensive editions, it's made of 18-karat gold"_

Woz's comment was speaking specifically to the products priced from $500 to
$1100. The gold case watches are $10k+.

Just an odd article for me. It's not news that Woz is technically focused, and
not terribly impressed with things like aesthetic design. There's also many
other documented reasons he might not think Jobs was a genius.

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tryitnow
There seems to be an inordinate amount of Jobs worship in the business press.

I wonder what qualifies someone as a genius? A lot of the ideas Jobs is given
credit for were swirling around the Silicon Valley/Homebrew Computing Club
milieu at the time. Maybe it just took someone with the energy and ego to put
himself in charge of commercializing all those ideas. If that's the case, I'm
a lot less impressed by Jobs and a lot more impressed by the real technical
geniuses who actualized his visions.

Don't meant to be overly critical here, I'm just naturally skeptical of
"larger than life" personalities. Upon investigating their biographies they
frequently turn out to be credit-hogging egomaniacs. Not all the time, but
frequently enough that I'm skeptical.

~~~
x5n1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality)

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Tycho
The thing I don't quite get about Wozniak is this. By all accounts, he was a
technical genius/prodigy. Early Apple would never have flourished without his
Herculean efforts, regardless of Steve Jobs' business savvy. But while people
may debate whether Steve Jobs was really a genius in any sense of the word,
there is no doubt that 70s/80s Apple was only the first act in an astonishing
career. The later successes were no less impressive. Whatever Jobs had going
for him in the beginning, he still had it at the end.

After early Apple, what did Wozniak do with his talents?

I don't want to sound uncharitable. I know Wozniak suffered head injuries in a
plane crash, which maybe made it impossible for him to function at his
previous levels of technical wizardry. I know not all accomplishments garner
headlines. And regardless of what happened after, starting Apple is still an
incredible achievement. But I'm curious if anyone has answers to this
question. I feel like it could tell us something interesting about the world.

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tyingq
He founded the EFF, and spends a fair amount of time on charitable efforts. He
does have a day job ([http://primarydata.com/](http://primarydata.com/)), but
it doesn't appear to define him.

Basically, he just seems like someone who doesn't define success in the same
way that Jobs would.

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Tycho
Well his talent was completely different in nature from Jobs' talent, but it
still yielded some world changing technology. Maybe the answer is that his
sort of talent is not as rare as you'd think, or easier to replace with teams
of less talented individuals.

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michaelbuddy
he doens't get it because he personally had to save Job's ass on a number of
occasions, and in fact, Jobs kept getting himself fired over stupid shit.

The Macintosh was floating on the sales of the Apple II. Without the Apple II,
the company would have failed. The IIgs is arguably a better computer. Woz did
more important genius type work for Apple, Jobs did a lot of great work, but
not genius level.

Jobs has a lot of charisma and you can't really put that in a bottle and
measure it. Jobs doubtfully had an IQ on par with Wozniak. However Jobs made a
lot of amazing things happen that wouldn't have. Doesn't make his brain genius
level. Like most bosses, he took a lot of great ideas other people had, and
solutions other people solved and helped a lot of management put it all
together.

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tslug
Woz nailed it.

Also, nevermind the bands for a moment. I had a digital Timex watch in the
1980s that was more responsive than the iWatch. Form eclipses function now.
That wasn't a thing that happened in his day.

Back then, when you got an Apple ][+, you got schematics, port assignments,
ROM and DOS listings. It was truly _your_ computer, and no piece of it would
ever need be a mystery. It was a computer that made love to developers.

Look at how OSX is developed now. It's getting iOSified. It's not open source.
You can find random processes firing up on it like Wifi_Agent or kernel_task
that take meaningful chunks of CPU time, but they don't really give you the
tools to easily analyze what's going on anymore. The firmware, OS, and
hardware have become opaque.

That was all Steve Jobs' influence. That and the iPhone.

I got rid of my phone years ago. It's annoying. I use my computer for
communication. I am a developer, but Apple doesn't give much of a hoot about
us. The Mac App Store is dead. XCode is really unpleasant. Whatever they're
doing in VR now, they're not playing well with others.

I would like to think if Wozniak were running the show, that he just wouldn't
have allowed things to head this developer- and computer-hostile direction.

