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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.

Thank you for expressing that, I agree wholeheartedly. There's this increasing sentiment that everything is a product - something many people on HN are responsible for promoting. Where once was humility, there's now opportunism: Terminal emulator? Meet subscription service. In an industry defined by it's ability to generate hype cycles and profit off them, there's something brilliant and refreshing about FOSS and it's culture.

Steve Jobs got the private jet and the flashy keynotes, but Linus Torvalds is undoubtedly the bigger rockstar.

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Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a charismatic designer and salesman.

Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and nothing for nearly 40 years - the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple. That’s more than “just” being a designer. 3 predecessors couldn’t figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn’t an idiot (Spindler wasn’t an idiot either - but oof talk about being out of your element)

The Apple of Wozniak is a historical footnote. Apple of today is NeXT - Jobs’ company.

A company doesn’t just succeed on technical prowess which is more where Woz’s skills lay. Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless. Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.

> the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself with

It's fair to say that success can be attributed to the Apple II, which without Woz wouldn't exist. Yes, he did not make the iPod - but he bolstered Steve when his technical council was empty and was content doing so for next-to-nothing. There's no need to belittle his actions, obviously nothing he did competed with the work Jobs was doing. The two operated in their own lanes.

> Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent is pointless.

I mean, I agree. Suffice to say that Steve Jobs could have never turned in his first Atari contract if Woz didn't do the work for him, though.

Yep, Apple needed them both. The Apple II was there early, but by the mid-80's it was very overpriced for its capabilities, compared to the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bits. It needed Jobs' marketing abilities.

Late 80's and 90's Apple survived purely because of marketing. Both Commodore and Atari had them beat technically, with the Amiga and ST. Remember, both of those could emulate the Mac and were half the price.

I remember them, and I have to tell you the Commodore and Atari 68k machines were not obvious winners. Ugly software, ugly hardware. I know this isn’t what fans of those machines want to hear, but Apple’s design aesthetic blew them and the PC away; Apple was simply in another league.

Late 80’s Macs had the best user experience available. Again, this isn’t a popular take, but it is absolutely true. “Apple’s marketing prowess is what sold them” is bullshit; Apple was better at selling, but not so much better that it could overcome perceivably middle of the road products. Apple’s industrial and UI design led the industry. Everybody else followed.

You are, of course, right. Apple's UI was better. I was primarily an Amiga user, but also had a friend with an Atari ST around that time, and both their desktops were kinda ugly. Amiga got more professional looking with 2.0, but still no match for the Mac in terms of usability.

Cray Research allegedly spent $0 on marketing and, if true, sort of did succeed directly because of technical prowess.

And they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and were bought for a file sale price by SGI (I think Cray could have used some high quality market research in the 80s.)

yes, after 24 years of operations, during most of which they had a monopoly on the world's fastest computers

No matter that subject, we all get hung up on the notion of forever, versus effective duration of use case of creations.

> Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.

Nah, you really think so?! Just because he was probably the most successful business leader in his generation you think he was smarter than us, HN commenters, despite our incredible feats like foreseeing the DropBox fiasco, predicting the LISP AI revival and so many others?

What leads you to such outrageous conclusion?

Kind of odd generalizing 'smart'. People have different skill sets and it's pointless comparing eg dev skills with marketing skills.

Imo, Jobs was good at making hype, that was his skill set and he was undoubtedly good at it. Woz, Torvalds, have very different skill sets from his but it's apples to oranges.

"Just" heh. Jobs is arguably one of the best product people in history.

The brains behind the hardware and software of the Apple II - a remarkable accomplishment, to be sure, but even there, the marketing and packaging that Jobs contributed was not nothing. And Woz contributed nothing whatsoever to the Mac, let alone the iPod, the iPhone, or the products that came later.

Woz left pretty much no traces on contemporary Apple. Jobs is all over the place (and, if anything, it's Tim Cook who is the underrated contributor). And for all the narrative of Woz as the unsung hero, he parlayed his fame and wealth into an impressive string of failed products, up to and including a blockchain (which, I think, is still a going concern).

I think some of this is because people don't have the same freedom to tinker with things for fun or altruism without a profit motive, because life is so much more unaffordable now. Generations Y, Z and α are all struggling to just survive let alone potentially retire.

Well surely there has to be a better moneymaking plot than desecrating FOSS. But generally I agree, I suppose.

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