Reminds me what an incredible guy Woz is as well. Makes me wish I could have been there as the two of them debated the future of the personal computer in their garage.
Not sure that would have been as enlightening as you think. They worked together on the Apple II, not the Mac. And the 6502 boxes were all Woz on the inside. His design, his software. Jobs added the box, the polish and the marketing. But all the look and feel wizardry and attention to detail was still in his future. Apple bootstrapped by selling a machine that was fundamentally the work of a single hacker.
Edit: I should explain more of my perspective here. Woz doesn't get remotely as much recognition as he deserves for Apple's success. Jobs was the executive, his leadership style, "force of taste" and personality were able to scale to Apple as it exists today. But by itself that would have gotten him zilch in 1976. Apple exists at all because One Guy was able to put together a single box at a production price point that wouldn't be matched for 7 years. The Apple II video hardware and especially the disk controller (both implemented with just a handful of off-the-shelf logic chips, no ASICs involved) were works of true, absolute, genius. Circuit design like that probably won't ever happen again.
You don't think hearing Jobs and Wozniak discussing the future of personal computers would have been all that enlightening? Did you watch the linked video? Wozniak explicitly refutes you. He says they discussed personal computers extensively and Jobs always pushed him to engineer ideas that other people weren't envisioning. He says that Jobs needed him at the beginning and that Wozniak owes much more after that to Jobs.
It's pointless to try to determine who was more important to Apple's initial success anyway. It's like trying to figure out whether the calves or the thighs contribute more to a vertical jump. Try keeping your legs perfectly straight at the knees and jumping with just the feet: You'll only get a couple inches off the floor. Now try keeping the ankle locked and jump off the heels with your thighs: You'll get a little higher. But if you take a full natural jump with your upper and lower leg, you'll jump far higher than the addition of both before. The point is, sometimes synergies just can't be broken down into obvious component forces.
To be sure, i am a bit of a woz fanboy, having lived through the 80's and poring over his work.
Though i don't begrudge Jobs the fame and fortune, i do think a lot of people overlook woz. To me, he is probably the single most influential pioneer in the history of personal computing.
Yes, Woz is my hero also but we have to consider - without Steve would we have seen Woz's brilliance? Great partnerships are difficult to untangle as to who influenced who, the greater.
It is illuminating to compare Apple's priorities then and now. You can easily see the common obsession with design and the drive to make it affordable. Despite Apple's early reputation, it's clear that they were still trying to keep the cost down so the experience could be shared by more people. Jobs was different, though, in that he would aggressively cut costs and just as aggressively not compromise on the user experience. Better a few things well than many poorly.
Apple then and now was able to make these "insanely great" products by attracting the absolutely best engineers. Yes, Jobs without [a] Woz is not successful. But Woz without [a] Jobs is equally so. And while brilliance in either slippery is rare, I don't doubt it's still easier to find someone with Woz's kind of talent than Jobs'.
Finally, even supposing that both skill sets are equally rare--who's going to be better at attracting new talent? One of the nice things about being able to persuade people to buy stuff is that the skill translates nicely to persuading people to share your vision and work for you.
Apple never meaningfully cut costs on the Apple II. It was a success in 1976 for reasons of cost, because it had features other machines didn't at a part count (i.e. production cost) much lower than its competitors. But the retail price was always higher than competing machines, always. This got a little silly towards the mid 80's, when a IIe would run you more than $1k while the C64 next to it was $200.
I continue to find it amazing the degree to which the reality distortion field still holds.
I remember a video of Steve in 1997(?) where he said "people want big beautiful color displays, maps, intuitive interfaces, etc." (horribly misquoted I'm sure). It was clear back then that he had the vision for the iPhone and iPad, in some way.
Just because Steve wasn't technically proficient doesn't mean that he didn't have any good input into the design and features of the machines that Woz was building. I'm sure Steve said a lot of things, about the software especially, that helped determine the direction of the product they were building.
What would Steve have said about the software? Have you actually used Integer BASIC? Looked through the red book at the code samples they shipped with the machine? Seriously, it's 100% Woz. The case, and the idea of selling it as a preassembled machine clearly came from Jobs. And the hustle required to actually sell and market them was all his. But I'm not kidding: Jobs' technical work lay in the future. His skills weren't well suited to the hardware world of the mid 70's.
Maybe we're talking past each other. It would be ridiculous to claim that Steve would've said "Woz, you should consider this design pattern or abstraction to solve that problem you're having". I imagine it would have been more general points about the user experience he hoped for.
But that's the thing: the Apple II simply had no "user experience" in the sense we understand today. You turned it on and got an Integer BASIC prompt (or the monitor). That software was a stripped down version of BASICs that existed elsewhere, not something meaningfully "improved" by Apple (except in the sense of running amazingly well in 8kb of RAM) it was hand written (hand assembled I believe) by Woz.
Eventually, sure, real software shipped for the Apple II. But in the early days it was all out of house (c.f. Applesoft). It wasn't until the days of ProDOS that Apple got serious about writing its own software, and by then Woz had left and Jobs was working on the Mac.
Really, download an emulator and try this thing. Then download the Red Book from bitsavers.org or wherever and read it. It's a hacker's paradise. It's very much not a precursor to the Mac, or the iPhone.
And it's all Woz. He's one of the greatest hackers ever to live, and yet people like you, trapped in the reality distortion field, have managed to needlessly forget him and/or write him out of the history books. And that makes me sad.
Why are OS X and iOS APIs riddled with NS prefix? Who founded NEXTStep? Was Woz there? Was Woz at Pixar? Not to diminish the input of the man, but: Steve without Woz would still be known for something. Woz without Steve? Would probably hack happily at HP.
A wonderful video - best thing I seen about Steve's passing. Woz is right. The dynamic of the two is what made Apple great. It's a classic case of a partnership that works with the sum being greater than the whole. Design (vision x moxie) + Ability (brains x sweat) = Great. And let's not forget the countless unsung worker bees who actually make it all happen. Viva Apple! His best line is about how entrepreneurs (like them) make something out of nothing but their ideas and passion. Thanks Woz and Steve
While this is about Steve Jobs, it was amazing how 1+1=11 with the two of them together.
I have often wished that Woz continued to design products with Apple long after he left. What if he had been there with Steve all this time?
If Woz invented the personal computer for the masses (Apple I, II, and building the Macintosh before Steve Jobs joined the team), what other unknown potential hasn't happened yet?
The other interesting thing is where Steve Jobs was seen as aloof and business minded, Steve Wozniak more than made up for it with heart.
A healthy, hearty and brainy balance if I may say.
If you ever get the chance to hear Woz speak drop everything and do it. As I mentioned on HN before http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524640 I heard him address MSU engineering students after he received his honorary doctorate.
He left an indelible impression on all of us that day that is still resonating months later. Made all of us want to go build something!
I'm pretty sure this happens a lot. Reporters get word of famous persons's death and then frantically try to be the first to get a reaction from the deceased's family, friends, etc.
After seeing this, it might be the only remembrance about Steve Jobs I need to hear.
We rarely take a minute to make a stranger into a person, and Woz shows how friendship remains above all else. All we have is the memories we make and create together.
I actually found that distasteful. They kept the camera rolling after they told him it was over, specifically to catch that kind of a moment. It strikes me as dishonest and sensationalistic. Give the man his privacy.
Same here. Jobs might've been a great business partner for Woz, but you can clearly see that Woz saw Jobs as friend above everything else from those tears.
Apple IIgs was my first computer and 6502 assembly was my first computer language. Woz was an amazingly talented guy, though I remember I had a hard time dealing with the non-contiguous video memory that he came up with on Apple II.
How does Woz saying that Steve Jobs was incredibly kind, sync up with the statment on Jobs' Wikipedia page that Jobs stole thousands of dollars from Woz when they were both at Atari [1]?
I've read him say that he didn't think it was a big deal. Woz seems a pretty forgiving guy.
Me, I'd be pissed b/c people like Jobs always seems to think engineers are just sitting around waiting to get punked. I hate that someone has to be like Jobs to do so well. But, I also recognize he was successful and had a great vision, I won't begrudge him that.
Why can't goodness and success go together more often, without good people just looking like patsies?
Steve Wozniak was the real tech wizard, but Steve Jobs was the visionary. Job's ability to empathize with users is beyond belief. He knew what people wanted before they even knew what they wanted. Bill Gates also had a strikingly similar vision. He famously said that "We have to figure out what a person needs that he doesn't know he needs. Then we make him realize that he does need it and we're the only ones who could give him the answer." Maybe he was copying Steve Jobs, wouldn't be the first time.