[amelius]

I'm trying to view your comment in perspective. Aren't there a lot of Chinese folks with similar skills, nowadays? I mean, there are a lot of cheap devices on the Chinese market, with an overall complexity greater than Apple ][. Yes, these systems are mostly glued together from SoC devices, but the Apple ][ was also built around a (then) sophisticated building block, 6502.

[blihp]

There are probably many more people in the industry today who are stronger in a single domain but far fewer who have expertise in multiple domains. Woz has serious skills in software, digital and analog circuits. You might say 'so what's the big deal? Just get three people to replicate the skillset'... this works for some things but not for others. Without the cross-domain expertise, there are things that even a small team of three just won't see / think to try that a single person would. So while your team of three was still trying to understand the problem, Woz would likely have designed a more elegant solution using a smaller/cheaper BoM than they would eventually come up with. (Woz wasn't just extremely competent in multiple domains, he also worked very fast)