The Mac was mostly created without Woz, but the Apple ][ is what paid for the Mac & access to Xerox’s tech. Pixar shows Jobs’ ability to find & develop a team, but the Pixar team is unlikely to have created Apple. NeXT was Job’s attempt to do Apple without Woz and it didn’t work because he missed affordability & efficiency elements Woz excelled at.
If iWoz is accurate, Woz created floppy drives, monitors, and a number of other technical firsts. Based on iWoz, a Woz without Jobs keeps working at HP for life and becomes a Jason Kridner (founder of BeagleBone.org) type influencer, which is still exceptionally cool.
The other critical factor, that really was clarified in iWoz, is how lucky they were to grow up where & when they did. By a roll of the dice they had access to electronics components that most people in the world never knew existed. They also grew up in an intellectual property environment unencumbered by the 30 years of rules based on companies like HP and Atari not wanting new hires like Woz and Jobs to fork a startup. Modern law and information availability will prevent anyone from ever repeating their successes in the “computer industry”. But people will repeat their success in other industries.
Also exploited NTSC to do artifact color.
All great hacks.
I think different: not saying that I am right but I think in an alternative reality without Woz the time window for building a company like Apple would not exist. Apple exists because of all the rare events happening early on that where capitalized later. We can apply the same thinking to unique companies like Microsoft or Google where even the amazing capabilities of their founders and employees need a rare seed and specific time to be seeded.
Nice.
> Apple exists because of all the rare events happening early on that where capitalized later.
That's definitely true. I'm not sure if the same early Apple stuff would have happened. But I could see post 90's Apple still happening in some fashion, especially if Jobs was truly able to con(vince) people into giving him funding via the reality distortion field. Jobs would probably have had to work his way up a little slower, but I could see him by the 90's as a kinda cult tech figure, respected enough that he could really work the VC funding circuit.
...why not?
Woz was and is a brilliant technologist, likely he enjoys making machines work.
Building a walled garden of high security and low hackability, which started with the original Macintosh, is where their roads must have started to diverge.
(For the record, as a person, I would very much prefer to be like Woz than like Jobs, all the billions notwithstanding.)
People say this like Jobs didn't also have technical skills. I am not sure where this myth comes from, but Jobs was plenty sharp around technology. Compared to Wozniak, no, but almost no one was. Jobs was every bit of a toolsy hacker that worked from a young age for a computer corporation.
I'm speaking about the main motivation.
That is, e.g. RMS was and maybe is an avid hacker, but most people associate him with his political stance first, and Emacs and GCC a distant second.
Also the first iPhone was released 30 years after the Apple 1, that's several generations in terms of technological advancement. Bill and Paul were no longer at Microsoft 30 years after the first Windows release. Google is barely 20 years old.
From what I've read over the years, I get the strong impression that Woz, while still genius, was never the same after his plane crash and severe head injuries.
The impression I got from Founders At Work was that Woz was a big big reason for Apple's short term success, but also didn't really understand Apple past a certain point. After all, a product like the iPhone, with its fused body and minimal hackability is utterly opposite to the values of an old school hardware hacker like Woz.