Reminds me what an incredible guy Woz is as well. Makes me wish I could have been there as the two of them debated the future of the personal computer in their garage.
Not sure that would have been as enlightening as you think. They worked together on the Apple II, not the Mac. And the 6502 boxes were all Woz on the inside. His design, his software. Jobs added the box, the polish and the marketing. But all the look and feel wizardry and attention to detail was still in his future. Apple bootstrapped by selling a machine that was fundamentally the work of a single hacker.
Edit: I should explain more of my perspective here. Woz doesn't get remotely as much recognition as he deserves for Apple's success. Jobs was the executive, his leadership style, "force of taste" and personality were able to scale to Apple as it exists today. But by itself that would have gotten him zilch in 1976. Apple exists at all because One Guy was able to put together a single box at a production price point that wouldn't be matched for 7 years. The Apple II video hardware and especially the disk controller (both implemented with just a handful of off-the-shelf logic chips, no ASICs involved) were works of true, absolute, genius. Circuit design like that probably won't ever happen again.
You don't think hearing Jobs and Wozniak discussing the future of personal computers would have been all that enlightening? Did you watch the linked video? Wozniak explicitly refutes you. He says they discussed personal computers extensively and Jobs always pushed him to engineer ideas that other people weren't envisioning. He says that Jobs needed him at the beginning and that Wozniak owes much more after that to Jobs.
It's pointless to try to determine who was more important to Apple's initial success anyway. It's like trying to figure out whether the calves or the thighs contribute more to a vertical jump. Try keeping your legs perfectly straight at the knees and jumping with just the feet: You'll only get a couple inches off the floor. Now try keeping the ankle locked and jump off the heels with your thighs: You'll get a little higher. But if you take a full natural jump with your upper and lower leg, you'll jump far higher than the addition of both before. The point is, sometimes synergies just can't be broken down into obvious component forces.
To be sure, i am a bit of a woz fanboy, having lived through the 80's and poring over his work.
Though i don't begrudge Jobs the fame and fortune, i do think a lot of people overlook woz. To me, he is probably the single most influential pioneer in the history of personal computing.
Yes, Woz is my hero also but we have to consider - without Steve would we have seen Woz's brilliance? Great partnerships are difficult to untangle as to who influenced who, the greater.
It is illuminating to compare Apple's priorities then and now. You can easily see the common obsession with design and the drive to make it affordable. Despite Apple's early reputation, it's clear that they were still trying to keep the cost down so the experience could be shared by more people. Jobs was different, though, in that he would aggressively cut costs and just as aggressively not compromise on the user experience. Better a few things well than many poorly.
Apple then and now was able to make these "insanely great" products by attracting the absolutely best engineers. Yes, Jobs without [a] Woz is not successful. But Woz without [a] Jobs is equally so. And while brilliance in either slippery is rare, I don't doubt it's still easier to find someone with Woz's kind of talent than Jobs'.
Finally, even supposing that both skill sets are equally rare--who's going to be better at attracting new talent? One of the nice things about being able to persuade people to buy stuff is that the skill translates nicely to persuading people to share your vision and work for you.
Apple never meaningfully cut costs on the Apple II. It was a success in 1976 for reasons of cost, because it had features other machines didn't at a part count (i.e. production cost) much lower than its competitors. But the retail price was always higher than competing machines, always. This got a little silly towards the mid 80's, when a IIe would run you more than $1k while the C64 next to it was $200.
I continue to find it amazing the degree to which the reality distortion field still holds.
I remember a video of Steve in 1997(?) where he said "people want big beautiful color displays, maps, intuitive interfaces, etc." (horribly misquoted I'm sure). It was clear back then that he had the vision for the iPhone and iPad, in some way.
Just because Steve wasn't technically proficient doesn't mean that he didn't have any good input into the design and features of the machines that Woz was building. I'm sure Steve said a lot of things, about the software especially, that helped determine the direction of the product they were building.
What would Steve have said about the software? Have you actually used Integer BASIC? Looked through the red book at the code samples they shipped with the machine? Seriously, it's 100% Woz. The case, and the idea of selling it as a preassembled machine clearly came from Jobs. And the hustle required to actually sell and market them was all his. But I'm not kidding: Jobs' technical work lay in the future. His skills weren't well suited to the hardware world of the mid 70's.
Maybe we're talking past each other. It would be ridiculous to claim that Steve would've said "Woz, you should consider this design pattern or abstraction to solve that problem you're having". I imagine it would have been more general points about the user experience he hoped for.
But that's the thing: the Apple II simply had no "user experience" in the sense we understand today. You turned it on and got an Integer BASIC prompt (or the monitor). That software was a stripped down version of BASICs that existed elsewhere, not something meaningfully "improved" by Apple (except in the sense of running amazingly well in 8kb of RAM) it was hand written (hand assembled I believe) by Woz.
Eventually, sure, real software shipped for the Apple II. But in the early days it was all out of house (c.f. Applesoft). It wasn't until the days of ProDOS that Apple got serious about writing its own software, and by then Woz had left and Jobs was working on the Mac.
Really, download an emulator and try this thing. Then download the Red Book from bitsavers.org or wherever and read it. It's a hacker's paradise. It's very much not a precursor to the Mac, or the iPhone.
And it's all Woz. He's one of the greatest hackers ever to live, and yet people like you, trapped in the reality distortion field, have managed to needlessly forget him and/or write him out of the history books. And that makes me sad.
> the Apple II simply had no "user experience" in the sense we understand today
Of course there is an user experience element on an Apple II. You just have to put the II in the context of the microcomputers if its time. It came in a plastic box, you could hook up your TV and you could display color and make music and sound effects in the speaker. You turned it on and you got a BASIC language interpreter instantly. You could connect a cassette recorder (an 8-track would do) and save your programs.
and you'll see the "user experience" of an Apple II was miles ahead what most of the competition could offer (monochrome text on a screen, fan noise, metal cases, serial terminals, no BASIC...) at much higher prices.
People often compare the II to other 8-bit micros like the Atari 400/800 and the VIC family, but forget they were launched 2 and 3 years after the II respectively.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have to disagree. I used the Apple IIe and the TRS-80 extensively during this period. I coded games and other software in BASIC and assembly on both machines. I poured over the schematics of both machines for hours at a time. You could literally say that I knew those machines inside and out.
What you refer to as "user experience" was not at all uncommon. The TRS-80, the Sinclair, and many other computers shipped in plastic boxes. I don't recall the Apple natively supporting a hookup to a TV (the TRS-80 did not), but this was certainly not a positive at the time... TVs were far more difficult to read and work on than monitors.
Both the TRS-80 and the Apple shipped with BASIC and connected to a cassette recorder.
There were dozens of other computers, but there were just a few that were commonly used.
The TRS-80 didn't have color and, unless you went into 32x16 mode, text would be unreadable on a TV (it had a matching TTL monochrome monitor built with a TV-grade CRT). 40x24 text was readable on the Apple II even through an RF modulator. While it didn't come with an RF modulator built-in, you could buy one cheaply.
In 77, there were more or less two computers that didn't look too much like office equipment: the II and the TRS-80 model 1. You mention the IIe and the Sinclair. The ZX-80 wasn't launched until 3 years after the original II. The IIe was introduced in 1983 (that is, after the III). The TRS-80 you remember is, most likely, the model III.
True, I thought I mentioned the color thing, but I guess not. You definitely could not read a TRS-80 clearly on a TV. You could on an Apple, but who would? Most people - remember the buyers were predominantly hobbyists and schools - bought the monitors.
I was working on a TRS-80 Model I in the late 70s, I want to say 1977 but maybe it was '78. I remember it vividly, even down to the massive 4kb memory expansion (which weighed around 10lbs and threw off massive amounts of heat).
Later on we got a Model III. It didn't have nearly as much character as the I. I didn't like the monolithic looks of it much but it was admittedly a much cleaner machine with the built-in disk drives (the Model I eventually supported 5 1/4" floppies but they were humongous standalone units.)
It's amazing how humble Woz is about it too. Even after several incidents between the two that paint Jobs in fairly poor light (such as the "Woz Plan"), Woz has nothing but respect and admiration for him.
I thought the first computer that Woz made had a mouse and GUI though ("borrowed" from Xerox PARC), am I remembering wrong? The Lisa was started in 1978 way before Woz left.
The first "computer" Woz made (and sold, I suppose) was the Apple I, which was actually a kit, just the motherboard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I
The first computer Woz made was the Apple II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II, which had no mouse or GUI, but could do graphics, which were mostly used by games. I suppose many programs for it used a TUI, a la VisiCalc.
Why are OS X and iOS APIs riddled with NS prefix? Who founded NEXTStep? Was Woz there? Was Woz at Pixar? Not to diminish the input of the man, but: Steve without Woz would still be known for something. Woz without Steve? Would probably hack happily at HP.
