Do you think Steve Jobs is the greatest presenter of modern times?

Jeremy Clarkson.

No. I never understood the fascination with him. Except to say I do respect his genius, but there are so many things that bother me about him it’s hard for me to be enthralled with him when I watch him.

The only genius Jobs had was self-promotion by appropriating other people’s work. Woz was the true innovator, Tesla to Jobs’ Edison.

I think Steve Jobs is dead.

He was a manipulative, power hungry egotist. As I understand it, one of the most unpleasant people to walk the earth.

Smart, yes. But I wouldn’t want him as a friend.

I think he was an actor, playing a role, at his presentations. I don’t think it was his real persona.

It wasn’t his presentation as much as the products. His presentations did not make any headway when his products weren’t designed well. He sold lots of iPods, but who had a Newton?

@SmashTheState Wozniak and Jobs separated years before Apple’s resurrection.

Jobs’ vision was the integration of functionality with design.

@cwotus – I know he’s dead but his charisma still persists. That’s why used present tense.

@zenvelo Woz didn’t just invent the Apple, he invented the entire idea of the personal computer. Before the original Apple, computers were room-sized things laboratories and large corporations used, interacted with by a religious caste of punchcard-wielding technicians. The Apple was the first hobbyist computer anyone could assemble and own in their own home. Jobs’ legacy is measured in dollars; Woz’s legacy is historic.

@SmashTheState nailed it. Selling Jobs as a genius is one of the most audacious marketing campaigns that Apple ever pulled off.

The Apple was the first hobbyist computer anyone could assemble and own in their own home

You had to really assemble it. Apple didn’t sell a case, keyboard, power supply or display.

And it would have stayed that way if Woz worked alone.

Apple would not have succeeded without both engineering and business genius.

You guys are all crazy.

Woz was a genius. That’s a fact, but so was Jobs. They had different, complimentary skills. Steve was a master of UX (user interaction) before there even was a field called user interaction. Apparently near his death (when he was recovering from surgery) he was critiquing the design of some of the machines in his hospital room. His genius is the ability to look at things and figuring out how they could be more usable. He’s the reason computers have fonts, and he’s probably the reason why computers have a graphical user interface. He didn’t invent the GUI or the mouse, but he understood their potential.

Another aspect that Jobs never gets credit for is his work at NeXT. The NeXT OS was really genius at the time. They went with a new programming language called Objective-C and wrote the Cocoa Framework to interact with the operating system. Objective-C and the Cocoa Framework were integrated into OS X when Apple bought NeXT and are currently running most of the code on all Macs, iPads, iPhones, Apple Watches, Apple TVs, etc. Swift will slowly replace it over time, but in an industry where technology changes rapidly, getting 30+ years out of a technology is phenomenal. Jobs didn’t write the code, but I’m pretty sure he understood the significance of Object Oriented programming, and his tiny team did some phenomenal work at NeXT—that says a lot about the guy.

I haven’t paid a lot of time or attention to Steve Jobs, but I’ve never felt drawn or impressed. He’s never seemed likable to me, and I’ve heard more strikingly negative things about him than anything I think of as favorable.

Ya he was smart and made lots of money and so on. What I know of his career mainly sounds like he was the most driven and money-accumulation/business-oriented of the Apple people, and that we wasn’t a very pleasant person to work with unless you were serving his needs. I really don’t like that kind of person or behavior at all and disapprove of it and feel it is enmeshed with the patterns of thinking and “values” (and the lack of other kinds of thinking, values, wisdom, and compassion) that is greatly endangering our planet and the happiness and survival of much of it, at the expense of ever-growing corporate power and excessive wealth accumulation of the very few.

As for being a “great presenter”, I can’t be bothered to watch much of him presenting anything, even though I do work with computers, for the above reasons and because I tend to think the Apple branding and stuff is mostly overdone showmanship. I do like Apple form factors in many cases and the way they make reliable machines for people who don’t want low-level control, but there are many downsides to what they did and how they did it. Near-slave-labor. Proprietary software BS. Too many versions that make each other obsolete to drive wasteful upgrades. Etc. No amount of presentation showmanship will make a show to overstate a fake attempt to exploit and ignore the costs and negatives is going to be something I’ll think of as “great” except in a “great at spinning” kind of way.

@Zaku “What I know of his career mainly sounds like he was the most driven and money-accumulation/business-oriented of the Apple people, and that we wasn’t a very pleasant person to work with unless you were serving his needs.”

I know that’s a popular opinion of the man, but I’ve had conversations with people who knew him personally. While it’s true that he was difficult to work for, he was a lot more like Gordon Ramsay or a perfectionist Architect type that would drive his staff past their limits to make something magical than a Mr. Burns/ Scrooge type of character who was just an evil guy that loved money. I really don’t think he was driven by money, but by making amazing things. The guy was a perfectionist. Just look at this story about rounded rectangles.

The only thing great about Steve Jobs and his legacy, is that he is dead.

@gorillapaws He may have understood the “potential” of the mouse in its infancy, but he was reluctant to add right click, which is a major reason I didn’t like Apple originally, and he had a problem with delete keys, which also drove me crazy, and he insisted the iPhone stay only the original size it was introduced in when a lot of us wanted a bigger phone. I don’t know if he finally relented on the last one, or if it was because he died they finally introduced the bigger phone, but I do often joke he finally died and now there are larger size options for the iPhone. I think if they had not finally made a larger phone Apple would have started to lose huge market share on phones. Maybe he just never needed reading glasses.

I criticize many clothing designers for being too much in their own head and not wanting to listen to the consumer, and he was the same in my opinion.

Maybe I’m just not the perfect fit for his products. I do own an iPhone now, and I had an iPad for a while, and my dad just gave me his so I have another. Still, I just am not head over heals with Apple like many people are. The products are not very intuitive to me like so many say.

@JLeslie There is a good logic to Apple mice only having a single button, and that’s so software designers didn’t hide critical functionality behind right click menus like they did on Windows. You could always mimic a right click by hitting the control key and clicking, or do a 2-finger click on modern Macs mice (OS X has always supported third party 2+-button mice from 10.0), but by not having that as the default behavior, it forced the software written to be more accessible and “discoverable.”

I don’t think you’ll find anyone who believes that Jobs never made mistakes (including himself if he were still alive), but you can be a perfectionist and still make mistakes. Look at the launch of the original Macintosh, this is a guy who is showing off something he is incredibly proud of. If you go to the end of the launch, just look at his face. It’s not the smile of a greedy guy thinking about all of the money he’s going to rake in, it’s the face of an artist who has just revealed something he’s been working on to the world and is basking in the positive reception. You can tell he’s probably having the best moment of his life right there on that stage.

Ricky Gervais

Steve Jobs could not present to save his life…ahh