[Arjuna]

Anytime Woz comes up, I can't help but think of this sentence that he wrote, way back on Google+, sometime in 2013, after the release of the Jobs film:

"And when Jobs (in the movie, but really a board does this) denied stock to the early garage team (some not even shown) I'm surprised that they chose not to show me giving about $10M of my own stock to them because it was the right thing. And $10M was a lot in that time."

[ChrisRR]

It always makes me sad that Wozniak, the real brains behind the operation get completely ignored in favour of Jobs who was just a salesman.

Similarly to Dennis Ritchie who worked on the C programming language and Unix, and dies a week after Jobs gets completely ignored and yet arguably has had more impact than someone who's just known for arguing about tech not being pretty enough

[jimbokun]

Not as famous as Jobs, but still well known and probably more beloved. Woz is kind of a living patron saint of engineers.

> someone who's just known for arguing about tech not being pretty enough

If you think that's all Jobs did, I don't know what to tell you.

He is in the running for most successful businessman in history.

[icedchai]

Young folks probably don't remember how close Apple was to dying in the late 90's. It was bad. Jobs is directly responsible for that huge turnaround.

[jeffalyanak]

Jony Ives and others like him saved Apple, not Jobs. Jobs was still making silly decisions that his team had to subvert or redirect in order to build the new, successful era of Apple.

[jimbokun]

Who identified Ive's importance and promoted him to such a key role in the company?

[danmg]

Jobs created the initial problem by undermining the Apple 2 GS.

[bitwize]

Jobs had a long-term vision in the future of Apple as a consumer electronics company, as opposed to a techie company. The explosive growth of Apple in the 2000s and 2010s would never have happened if Apple hadn't matured out of being the company that made the Apple II line.

[icedchai]

They explored some of this in the 90's with the Newton, Pippin, Macintosh TV, etc. None of that stuff was a resounding success. It was all too early.

[danmg]

Computer companies getting into consumer electronics is a result of average consumers wanting devices that behave more like and interact with computers. It's not the result of some messianic insight that no other company had.

We can't speculate on what a Apple Prime would have done without Jobs. But we do know that his single mindedness about making arbitrary changes cost them several years in the 80s and led to the slump in to the 90s.

[icedchai]

I wanted a IIgs when I was younger, until someone told me about the Amiga. I also looked at the Atari ST. They were both cheaper and much more powerful. (I went with the Amiga. )

[danmg]

It was intentionally neutered so as to not complete with their "Flagship".

[guenthert]

If that is true, then I appreciate him more as business man and leader. The 2 GS was late to the game and a dead-end. In '83 us geeks would have killed for that machine, but in '87 after Atari ST and Amiga were released two years prior?

[danmg]

It was a dead end because it was intentionally made to be an inferior product.

[gota]

I recall folks around then asking me if 'we' (as in, computer science students) were having any kind of review of Jobs' contributions to the field in his memory

They were fans, so not pleased when I told them one could know every single thing there is to know about CS and never hear his name once

I'm not demeaning his achievements, but the general cultural view of Steve Jobs is of a technical and scientific genius that he was very likely not. Who knows? He might have been above average, even gifted, but there is not much to show for it

[englishrookie]

In Civilization 5, Steve Jobs was a "Great Merchant". This sparked some debate too, at the time. The game also had "Great Scientist", "Great Artist", "Great Engineer", and "Great Prophet". Given his huge following, I guess the latter would have been an appropriate category too.

[alexgmcm]

I agree that Jobs is overhyped, but his contributions via NeXT were pretty considerable, no?

I mean, the vision was for a powerful yet affordable computer for use in Higher Education. This seems like quite a noble goal given the technological limitations at the time.

[icedchai]

NeXT software was wonderful.

The hardware? Not so much. The other workstation vendors of the era (Sun, SGI, HP, DEC...) ran rings around NeXT. The 680x0 platform NeXT chose was approaching obsolescence by the early 90's.

[AgloeDreams]

I always felt the Next platform limitations is why he was paranoid about CPU architecture at Apple.

[langitbiru]

So sometimes I'm confused. Is Jobs a salesman or a product guy? We know the famous rant from Jobs about salesmen / marketing people ruining companies. Some people even refer Jobs as the great marketing guy.

[EricE]

Jobs was all of that and more. Modern personal computing wouldn't exist without his insistence at making "Computers for the rest of us". There were many quite pissed at Apple for selling pre-assembled, ready to use computers. It was thought that unless you could assemble your machine you didn't deserve it.

Heck you see a lot of that attitude today in many open source projects.

And that's just one way he pushed modern computing into what it is today. Did he perform every detail himself? Nope - that would be absurd. But he took things that until that time no one else correlated, and he correlated and pushed for them. Often with amazing presence. And it wasn't willy-nilly, either.

I mean just look at the way he handled this OpenDoc troll:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

How many can compose themselves and deliver that kind of a response that quickly? Not many.

So yeah, those who try to dismiss Jobs as just a marketing or product guy are only displaying their profound ignorance. I don't think Jobs was perfect - far from it. But he certainly did make a dent in the universe, and many others too - perhaps it is a good thing that people like Jobs are pretty rare but there is no doubt we would all be a lot poorer if he hadn't existed.

[sukilot]

Do you think Woz (the real brains behind the operation) thinks Jobs was just a salesman?

[carldaddy]

Jobs and Wozniak were both masters of their own domain.

[EricE]

Exactly. Like many great teams they complemented each other beautifully - Apple would not have started without both of them bringing their strengths and playing them off each other.

Life is NOT a zero sum game.

Freaking cancel culture - no one is willing to expend any effort on nuance or deep thought. It's either yes/no, good/bad - zero room for discussions of the space between. How boring.

[techslave]

just? sales is the more important part of a for profit company you know.

[jagged-chisel]

I had the same disappointment when I watched. I thought it would have been a splendid bit of drama ...

[uniqueid]

"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is the only Apple docu-drama that actually cared about the docu- part.

https://youtu.be/L4zE7WGfnuw

[29athrowaway]

I think the ending aged like milk, i.e.: "Steve Jobs capitulating to Microsoft".

First of all, it's simply a mischaracterization, and second, today we interpret that moment very differently to the way it's portrayed in that movie. Steve Jobs turned Apple around spectacularly and went on to create the company with the highest market capitalization in the world, surpassing even Microsoft for many years.

Other than the ending, that documentary does a better job representing Steve Jobs' life than recent biographical movies.

There should be a documentary that covers Steve's life in his NeXT years.

[mnky9800n]

I think that is a fair criticism in retrospect. I also think that the ending was exactly on point with where people thought Apple and Microsoft were going at the time the movie was filmed and released (1999 release).

I would love to see a documentary about NeXT. I feel like there is a missing component in the YouTube technology discussion which is actual documentary films. If you go and look up NeXT computers, there are people talking about something they bought on ebay, there is old footage of steve jobs pitching next computers, but there isn't any sort of scripted narrative documentary told via old footage, current interviews, etc. This is true basically across the space of technology videos on youtube. It's not limited to NeXT. Ironically, I made something like this for scientific models. Maybe if I want this, I should hunt down people willing to tell stories on camera and make it myself. lol.

[namdnay]

> there isn't any sort of scripted narrative documentary told via old footage, current interviews, etc.

I suspect this is because of the economics of youtube. I don't think there is enough money in it for niche documentaries to be profitable. Either it's quick cheap solo stuff, or it's big documentaries but with a nice broad appeal (e.g. Vice or food stuff)

[mnky9800n]

Yeah I thought about that. I never thought about monetizing it because you could take lots of found footage from youtube anyways and then build a narrative from additional interviews. I guess it requires so much effort that it ends up becoming a job though.

[baryphonic]

Such a good movie. I have a copy on my machine, and I'm sometimes sad that it's a 4x3 analog cable TV broadcast before HD. On the other hand, the fact that it's so good despite the constraints speaks to how well made it was.

[LeonM]

The Pirates of Silicon valley DVD was the first item I've ever bought on Amazon. This was circa 2001, I was 15 and living in Europe. Ordering something from the US over the internet and having it delivered 2 weeks later was very exciting back then. I also had to 'hack' my DVD player to circumvent the region lock.

Anyway, my point being is: there is a 572p 16:9 version available on DVD.

[BuildTheRobots]

I wonder if it's a real 16:9 version or if they just cropped the top and bottom off the 4:3 cut.

Some early DVDs had a lot of love put into their production, some others did pretty heinous things to the source material though.

[emteycz]

Perhaps we could remaster it using machine learning?

[randcraw]

A better film than "Jobs" is the documentary "Steve Jobs Man in the Machine", free to see at:

https://www.documentarymania.com/player.php?title=Steve%20Jo...

Mentioned in the CNN doc is the trick Jobs played on Woz in their first business deal. Jobs told Woz that Atari had paid them $700 to build the game Breakout and paid him half, or $350. But in fact Atari had paid them $7000, not $700.

Yet even after learning this, Woz continued working with Jobs and later co-found Apple. That says a lot about both men.

[fiftyacorn]

The scene was just showing what a dick Steve Jobs was

I dont think Woz's actions would have lowered your opinion any more on Jobs