It's also the same dude who brought us beloved products in Apple's lineup. It's almost a meme at this point to say that Jony Ive's genius needs a containing force like Steve Jobs. Perhaps Sam Altman can fill that role.
Jobs, for all his faults, understood where aesthetic, functionality and user experience intersected extremely well.
He got stuff wrong too, don’t get me wrong, but I have yet to see another CEO (heck any business person of note) with the same pattern of deep understanding of how those things intersected as well as he did
People say this while outright ignoring all the outright failures Jobs had because he DIDN'T have that understanding.
The Lisa, the Newton, NeXT computers, trying to dump Pixar pretty much right before they made it big right as the tech was finally catching up to their ideas.
The reality is Jobs got to roll the dice a bunch of times, and if you get to roll the dice a lot, you will have some wins. Looking only at the wins is not useful.
I don't have the time or space to write up a proper rebuttal, but I will suffice to say, after reading an incredible amount about not only Jobs, but Apple, NeXT, the Newton, Pixar, things about tech, especially early home computing, the man performed well above his peers with regards to where aesthetic, functionality and user experience intersected. Note, I am not talking about how he ran the businesses otherwise.
He wasn't always right, as I said already, but he was far better than most at this. More importantly, he was far better at most at getting others to shave their vision down to the simplest of ideas.
If you look at the competitors to Apple or NeXT during their respective eras, they were not very thoughtful in their deliberations.
It doesn't mean every idea he had was successful either, but I'm speaking specifically to the fact he intersected the three points extremely well. At a certain point, someone is good enough at something its more than luck
He got stuff wrong too, don’t get me wrong, but I have yet to see another CEO (heck any business person of note) with the same pattern of deep understanding of how those things intersected as well as he did