zlacker

Ah, the old myth about the irreplaceable engineer and the dumb suit. Ask Wozniak about that. I don't think he believes Apple would be without Steve Jobs.

>>siva7+(OP)
Steve Jobs would be nothing without Wozniak to design something people wanted.

>>lepton+T7
vice versa ;)

>>siva7+(OP)
Sam Altman is no Steve Jobs.

>>siva7+(OP)
Apple without Woz did fine. Apple without Jobs not so much.

>>siva7+a8
If Steve Jobs couldn't claim Wozniak's work as his own, he wouldn't have landed "his" Atari contract. Who knows where things would have gone after that, but I have a hard time tracing Apple's history of success without, say, the Apple II.

>>OscarT+tf
OpenAI is no Apple.

>>lepton+T7
But the point is that Woz was replacable, because he was replaced. Jobs on the other hand was replaced and the company nearly died, he came back and turned it around. Of course it only because a trillion dollar company after Tim Apple took over, which I guess just shows that nobody is irreplacable.

>>ascorb+Xk
Tim Cook?

>>sunshi+Yh
Stock market is full of dumb suits falling for salesman

>>Capita+QE
Trump said Tim Apple instead of Tim Cook: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tim-apple

>>smolde+Ti
The milieu in which Apple came to fruitition was full of young small microcomputer shops. So it's not like Woz invented the microcomputer for the masses - his contribution was critical for early Apple for sure, but the market had tons of alternatives as well. Without Apple II it's hard to say were Jobs and Wozniak would have turned out. Jobs is such a unique, driven figure that I'm fairly sure he would have created a lasting impression on the market even without Woz. This is not to say Woz was insighnificant - but rather the 1970's Silicon Valley had tons of people with Woz's acumen (not to disparage their achievements) but only few tech luminaries who obviously were not one trick ponies but managed to build their industrial legacy over decades.

>>fsloth+TS
I don’t believe the evidence backs this up. Woz is as much a one off as Jobs.

Woz did two magic things just in the Apple II which no one else was close to: the hack for the ntsc color, and the disk drive not needing a completely separate CPU. In the late 70s that ability is what enabled the Apple II to succeed.

The point is Woz is a hacker. Once you build a system more properly, with pieces used how their designers explicitly intended, you end up with the Mac (and things like Sun SPARCstafions) which does not have space for Woz to use his lateral thinking talents.

>>fidotr+Jc1
I’ve always in my mind compared Apple 2 to the likes of Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum etc - 8 bit home computers. Apple 2 predates these several years ofc. You could most certainly create an 8 bit home computer without Woz. I haven’t really geeged out on the complete tech specs & history of these, it’s possible Apple 2 was more fundamental than that (and would love to understand why).

>>fsloth+jp1
Apple already had competitors back then in the likes of Franklin Computers. From a pure "can you copy Woz" perspective, it's not really even a question; of course you could. It was always a matter of dedication and time.

It's foolish for any of us to peer inside the crystal ball of "what would Jobs be without Woz", but I think it is important to acknowledge that the Apple II and IIc pretty much bankrolled Apple through their pre-Macintosh era. Without those first few gigs (which Woz is almost single-handedly responsible for), Apple Computers wouldn't have existed as early (or successfully) as it did. Maybe we still would have gotten an iPhone later down the line, but that's frankly too speculative for any of us to call.

>>smolde+is1
If Steve Jobs didn't have Woz, or if the Apple 1 or 2 flopped, Steve Jobs would have gone on to sell something else - medical supplies, timeshares, or who knows what and maybe he'd be famous in another industry, but not necessarily attaining a reality distortion field. If Apple flopped early, maybe he would have stayed with selling computers, for another company but he wouldn't be elevated to the status he was, because he had Woz's contribution and had total marketing control over it. If he had to work for another company in sales, Steve Jobs would be reprimanded and fired for his toxic attitudes. There is probably an alternate universe where Steve Jobs is a nobody. The reality is that he got very, very lucky in this universe.

>>siva7+(OP)
The first Steve was totally irreplaceable, the second Steve was probably arguably the difficult one to be replaceable. Without the first firing, the second Steve would never exist. But then when Apple current ball rolling, he was replaced fine with Tim Cook.