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by ajross 5377 days ago
I guess this is true, but it's seems like a needless digression. Woz did all that stuff. The power-on prompts (both monitor and BASIC) were his. TV output certainly wasn't a Jobs innovation (nor was it Woz's, he just did it better with a staggeringly low part count).

My point earlier was that attributing this to Jobs purely because of an intuition that "Jobs does UX" is incorrect, and speaks more broadly to my point that Woz has been terribly shafted by history.

I mean, when a site called "Hacker News" no less can't speak unanimously to this man's genius, something is terribly wrong.
2 comments
rbanffy 5377 days ago
> Woz did all that stuff.

While I agree the II is not a Jobs-only product, I can't imagine Jobs sitting quietly letting Woz make all the decisions. I can't picture Jobs sitting quietly at all.

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keenerd 5376 days ago
Woz put up a serious fight to make the Apple II as powerful as possible.

Jobs wanted it to be as cheap as possible. Jobs planned to sell two expansion cards, so the Apple II only only needed two expansion slots. Woz refused to hobble the machine when he could easily make it have seven expansion slots.

The Apple II had seven, and within a year there was a flourishing third party market providing all sorts of expansion options.

The Apple II was the last product where Woz had any serious amount of input and (if you had any interest in technology) it was Apple's peak.

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rbanffy 5376 days ago
> Woz put up a serious fight to make the Apple II as powerful as possible.

A fight for user experience. Woz is the ultimate hacker advocate and he understood the II was a hacker's computer. Jobs was the ultimate common-person advocate. The Mac was the ultimate common-person computer.

And yes, the Jobs/Wozniak equilibrium is my favorite period for Apple. The II is still my favorite computer.

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ern 5377 days ago
Not to diminish the genius of Woz, but it should be pointed out that in a design book (I think it was The Design of Everyday Things) his CORE universal remote was singled out for harsh criticism because of its overly complex UI.

Based on this, there may be some truth in the idea that he lacked some UX finesse.

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