Similarly to Dennis Ritchie who worked on the C programming language and Unix, and dies a week after Jobs gets completely ignored and yet arguably has had more impact than someone who's just known for arguing about tech not being pretty enough
> someone who's just known for arguing about tech not being pretty enough
If you think that's all Jobs did, I don't know what to tell you.
He is in the running for most successful businessman in history.
We can't speculate on what a Apple Prime would have done without Jobs. But we do know that his single mindedness about making arbitrary changes cost them several years in the 80s and led to the slump in to the 90s.
Apple could have launched in iPhone like product years ahead of when they did if they kept that branch of the company afloat. That would have been a real 'visionary' move. Instead, they were forced to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace by emphasizing little design flourishes and style.
Job's only real contribution is managing to gaslight (a.k.a, his "reality distortion field") the entire industry into thinking he had any real insight or ability beyond that of a typical middle manager with a cluster-b personality disorder.
It would have been exposed as being a dead end with no backwards compatibility. The GS was essentially a completely different architecture from its predecessors anyway. Compatibility was maintained with the Mega2 chip. Apple wouldn't have been stuck for a couple of years with barely any software on their "flagship" product.
The GS would have killed the Macintosh if they raised the clock speed, gave it some higher video resolution modes, and developed something like the Macintosh Toolbox in ROM for it.
They were fans, so not pleased when I told them one could know every single thing there is to know about CS and never hear his name once
I'm not demeaning his achievements, but the general cultural view of Steve Jobs is of a technical and scientific genius that he was very likely not. Who knows? He might have been above average, even gifted, but there is not much to show for it
I mean, the vision was for a powerful yet affordable computer for use in Higher Education. This seems like quite a noble goal given the technological limitations at the time.
The hardware? Not so much. The other workstation vendors of the era (Sun, SGI, HP, DEC...) ran rings around NeXT. The 680x0 platform NeXT chose was approaching obsolescence by the early 90's.
Heck you see a lot of that attitude today in many open source projects.
And that's just one way he pushed modern computing into what it is today. Did he perform every detail himself? Nope - that would be absurd. But he took things that until that time no one else correlated, and he correlated and pushed for them. Often with amazing presence. And it wasn't willy-nilly, either.
I mean just look at the way he handled this OpenDoc troll:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
How many can compose themselves and deliver that kind of a response that quickly? Not many.
So yeah, those who try to dismiss Jobs as just a marketing or product guy are only displaying their profound ignorance. I don't think Jobs was perfect - far from it. But he certainly did make a dent in the universe, and many others too - perhaps it is a good thing that people like Jobs are pretty rare but there is no doubt we would all be a lot poorer if he hadn't existed.
Life is NOT a zero sum game.
Freaking cancel culture - no one is willing to expend any effort on nuance or deep thought. It's either yes/no, good/bad - zero room for discussions of the space between. How boring.