Technically true. I believe you could buy the original Apple circuit board designed by Woz. But the Apple ][ was Jobs’ invention. He packaged and marketed a PC that people would buy in droves. He invented the PC that everybody wanted to buy. Before that, the majority of the market for PCs was engineers, programmers, and electronic hobbyists.
Jobs genius was in making sure the final product was elegant and simple to use. The products worked the way a neophyte (newbie) would guess it would work. It never intimidated. He was relentless in those goals.
Sorry, when I think “iPod” I think of my iPod Touch. But I’m sure he did the same thing with the hard disk suppliers that he did with the optical drive suppliers when he was running Next.
I disagree.
Apple’s great strength was taking an existing product and making a smooth, easily-used version with “sex appeal” to the average WOMAN-about-town.
Why do you think the iMac came in pretty colors?
My take is that rather being akin to a Thomas Edison (a comparison a think is particularly overblown) he was more of a Henry Ford. This column by David Pogue really highlights his accomplishments as well as his daring:
Just marketing? Sure, when this old engineer is feeling really cynical. But this old Linux FOSS guy also has to acknowledge that Jobs had a way of making technology elegant. And beautiful.
I think Steve sums up his legacy by his simple statement:
“There has to be a better way.”
i’ve seen mention where he would reject a circuit board design because it didn’t look appealing. he was a designer and a marketer. he wasn’t an electrical engineer or computer scientist, he was more of a designer like Brooks Stevens (who coined the term ‘planned obsolescence’ and practiced it, so i think Steve studied Stevens well).
He wasn’t perfect, and was a perfectionist to a fault sometimes.
But, I think he just had an intuitive sense as to how things should work, and saw the even bigger and more important picture of how they should all integrate, so the features themselves are really a smaller part of a unified system that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Things are much more complicated when it comes to building highly advanced consumer electronics for any one man to achieve the things Apple did. He was responsible for putting all these inventions together in a way that was truly innovative and had mass-appeal.
Don’t be so quick to dismiss aesthetics and design as having no value… especially when it comes to consumer products. This goes not only for the hardware, but the interface as well.
His greatest invention, really, was Apple itself.
Steve Jobs did to Apple what Starbucks did to people.
Starbucks took mornng coffee, overcharged for it, but for you $2.50 you get to feel like a rich yuppie for five minutes, and poor people bought it.
Jobs took Apple products, overpriced them, and poor people buy them with the hope of looking cooler. The Simpsons did a great parody on this.
I fell for it to, I had an iPod and it was great but it doesn’t do anything I can’t get done a LOT cheaper. There were mp3 players around for a while before the iPod but Apple made it cooler to own one.
The Apple products are not overpriced. Quite the contrary. They have been responsible for driving down market prices for consumer technology.
So simplistic.
And completely wrong.
While there may be a few people who buy Apple products to look “cool” (I can’t imagine why - it would be like drinking Coke to be a rebel), the vast majority of people buy Apple products because they work, and they work well.
I’ve known literally thousands of Macintosh users over the years. I’m not sure that a one of them ever bought a computer to be cool.
Also, most of them have a huge list of inventors. It’s impossible to know how much, if anything, Jobs contributed.
Jobs’ main talent was in saying “this sucks”, and getting people to fix it. It’s an underrated skill.
I think an enormous amount of Apple products were purchased by people who had no idea if they worked well. Cool is better explanation of the phenomena.
The Apple II was most certainly Wozniak’s invention, not Jobs’. Wozniak designed the hardware and wrote the firmware. Jobs did things like choose the shape of the case, the design of Apple’s new corporate logo (the striped apple with a bite taken out), and made sure the machine came with good technical and user manuals.
Jobs was certainly necessary to the process. Wozniak on his own would never have made the Apple II a salable product. But I would call it Wozniak’s invention nevertheless.
He invented an outfit: the black mock turtleneck sweater and jeans.
The company that sells the shirt he preferred (he allegedly bought about two dozen per year at $175 each) is now backlogged on orders for them, and they have announced they are going to donate all the sales of that item to the American Cancer Society in Steve Jobs name. He even called the CEO of that company occasionally to tell him how much he liked the sweater. (and no doubt offer some critique of just a few things they could still improve.)
This story is interesting on its own but it ties into this thread. Across the world people are rushing to buy a $175.00 black sweater because it was the sweater he selected. In this case, since he just died, much of this can be attributed to nostalgia but it does demonstrate something more. People won’t buy the shirt to boast that it cost $175 and they won’t buy it because it becomes a fashion trend, they buy it because if Steve Jobs thought it was good, it probably is very good. And by the same token he could sell computers that he thought were good even at a premium, because people understood the high bar it had to pass in order to be considered good by him, and they trusted his judgement. Nobody got burned by that blind faith - he proved himself right over and over again and it became an informed choice, not blind faith, to presume that if Steve liked it, it was good.
In the old days Macintosh products did cost more than Intel PC’s, for a while, but it wasn’t because of some Yuppie desire to be fashionable that people bought them and the PC’s were in no way equivalent to the experience of using a Macintosh even if they theoretically could do most of the same things. People recognized the same quality that he did in them but that quality came with additional cost and it was a ‘niche’ market, but not a yuppie or flashy market. That all changed after his return to Apple anyway - the world had changed, suppliers had changed, his status had changed, and he was able to negotiate deals and institute practices across the entire company, not just engineering, which allowed Apple hardware to be less expensive than equivalent competition and still maintain that mile long lead in quality and usability.
Anyone can get a $9.00 sweater at K-mart any time they want. I wouldn’t criticize anyone who did, but I sure wouldn’t consider someone to be a yuppie fool because they would prefer something of higher quality at a higher price.
Woz invented a circuit board. Jobs invented a PC, the first true Home Computer. I’m not taking anything away from Woz. I’m trying to point out that Jobs was more than just a guy selling stuff thought up by other people. There were many better computers being made at the time. But the average consumer had no interest in them. They came in ugly cases, required prior knowledge of computer hardware and software to be useful, and rarely were as complete a package as the Apple ][, and in no case as desireable a package. Jobs deserves credit for that. He didn’t invent the technology, but he invented a product.
There’s no question the Apple makes cool products, but I don’t think people buy them to appear cool. At least, I’ve never met anyone who did, and as I’ve said before, I’ve known thousands of Apple owners. However, I have known people who will go out and buy an Apple product on the first day it’s available, without reading any reviews or hearing any word-of-mouth on it, simply because they know that it will work well because it’s an Apple product. THAT is what makes Apple great.
Reputation.
There are few companies on the planet that have a similar reputation. Perhaps BMW. Maybe Sony 20 years ago. To get there requires more than marketing legerdemain. It requires constant attention to detail, and customer support. Which is why Apple consistently rates at the top for both owner satisfaction and customer service.
Right. No argument there.
Slight argument here, although I suppose this is a highly subjective topic. Personally I’d say the Apple II was easily the best home computer available when it was introduced in 1977. Its competitors at that time were the Commodore PET, the TRS-80, and I think maybe the Imsai was still around. (But wouldn’t be for long.)
We are in full agreement again.
Other available PCs; Altair, Processor Technology, Vector Graphics, Digital Group, Polymorphic Systems, TDL, CompuColor, Exidy, the list is quite long. I actually didn’t consider any of them better as home computers, but others did. Most of them predated the TRS-80 and Pet, which were ‘me too’ products.