It's underrated how great Steve Jobs's taste was, and how sincere the "liberal arts + technology" line is
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
And watch out, there’s a bear behind you.
An entire bear spontaneously tunneling across a large distance or spontaneously forming out of vacuum fluctuations is really, really quite unlikely.
That's true for both biological bear population dynamics and movement patterns and for quantum tunneling bears :)
Only if you accept that as true axiomatically.
I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.
But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.
Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered much of the same ground as Newton.
Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around, much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally sooner or later.
Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long way.
Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.
Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
No need to ask around, lots of people who worked for Jobs have gone on the record as saying he was the worst person they have ever worked for. If you ran into him (or worse, had to present something to him), you never knew if you were going to get Nice Steve or Angry Steve. Nice Steve would thank you for your work and politely inform you of changes or refinements that he wanted you to make. Angry Steve would verbally berate you in front of your manager and peers.
He had a set of close associates that he never or rarely treated badly, it is not hyperbole to say that most everyone else got the brunt of his wrath.
Straight from Woz, if you don't want to take my word for it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...
The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are genial, since very few people are genial.