[icehawk]

Maybe not "underrated" but "Jobs only did marketing, Woz did all the technical work" is a very persistent comment I see on the internet when he's brought up.

[CrimsonCape]

Not to discount Jobs as a person, but the narrative in 100 years could easily be "Jobs was in the right place at the right time when technology reached a miniaturization threshold such that a computer could be in every person's pocket, the first time in human history; and Jobs led the first company to be there at the right time and capitalize."

[Turing_Machine]

Woz is a technical genius, no doubt about it.

But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.

Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.

Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.

[eru]

> But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.

Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered much of the same ground as Newton.

[philwelch]

The calculus, sure, but not the physics.

[eru]

Newton didn't do everything that Leibniz did, nor did Leibniz do everything Newton did.

Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around, much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally sooner or later.

Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long way.