Inside Steve Jobs : A Technical Introspect by A Cynic

          As a student of engineering, what is more important for me is the way a system works under the hood and not the outer glitz and glamor.

Recently Steve Jobs passed away and the world mourned him. The newspapers read “An era of technology came to an end on October 5^th when Apple Inc founder (read co-founder) and former CEO passed away “.  Further he is credited for all Apple products post his return to the company. All through if you notice the actual men behind Steve Jobs were never acknowledged. Neither has Steve himself ever said it.

          And what I found while reading his wiki page is that he is referred as co-founder, a business magnate and an inventor. The inventor part irked me. Call him an innovator. 

No qualms, but an inventor??

        Many think that Steve Jobs is the talisman behind the iPod, iPhone, iPad… No isn’t. He wasn’t technically capable of even writing a code. Yes!!

Steve had an instinctive brain. His lone aim in life was to make money (fact he never gave scope for competition, wasn’t a philanthropist)   . If I not wrong, he was a cunning fox, very street smart man.

        Nobody knows about the “Other Steve” behind Apple Inc. He is Steve Wozniak, a computer scientist and electrical engineer. He worked in HP Company where Jobs would attend after school lectures and later he was hired and worked under Wozniak. The friendship grew and at one instance Jobs literally used Wozniak to make money. At Atari Inc the game “Breakout” was being conceptualized and Jobs was given the responsibility to design the prototype. Jobs was being offered $750 for it with extra $100 for each chip removed from the original 100 used. He said he would do it in 4 days. Jobs knew his friend Wozniak would do it and hence he stuck a deal with him for a 50-50 share of the earnings. After 4 sleepless nights Wozniak completed it and reduced the design by 50 chips. So according to the deal Jobs had with Atari, he was paid 750$ and an additional 5000$ for the reduced chips. But the smart Jobs (read GREEDY) gave Woz only 375$ and kept 5000$ for himself.

Apple 1 and 2 both were completely designed by Steve Wozniak and all that Steve Jobs did was to sell it. The “other Steve” was the man behind the creation of Apple Inc. Woz never intended to start a company and make money but Jobs was. It was HP s loss that they rejected Woz’s creation which later went on to revolutionize computer industry.

With the taste of success, the ego and greed grew and at the same time Steve Wozniak met a fatal flight crash and the next Apple computer 3 failed in design and logic as Woz wasn’t involved. Without him Jobs faced a lot of problems in his design dept. and hence started recruiting CEO s to run his company and his errant behavior and bad temperament eventually led to his ousting from his own company. Even the success of Macintosh couldn’t help Jobs.

Post his ousting, He found Next which was later acquired by Apple which lead him to come back to his company as CEO. That is where he found his new talisman Jonathan Ive. 

Jonathan Ive became his new best friend only after Steve Wozniak. He is currently the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is the man, irreplaceable in Jobs life says his wife.

You might have used an iPod,iMac,iPad etc and you might have thanked Steve Jobs for the masterpiece. But Jobs isn’t the man responsible for it. The little known Jonathan Ive is. 

Read More about Jonathan Ive here.

Read here how Steve Jobs stole Ive limelight.

He is not credited in public. Recent report says that Jobs always took credit of Ive s design. And that is what even we have been seen all through. Steve Jobs always took credit of others creation but this never stopped him from criticizing the others for copying and piracy.  

PS: I have nothing against Steve Jobs. This is just my personal view and I wanted to learn about the actual people responsible for Apple Products. There is no denying about the fact that Steve Jobs was a tough CEO. I'm Bitch :D