I thought iWoz was bittersweet, even cautionary. Here's this brilliant guy doing unbelievable work, then after he makes it he's just spending his time figuring out what to do with the money ... and he designs a new remote so he can watch TV better.
That is the journey of a maker. You make things. Some of them are wildly successful, others less so, but you still make them. You don't do it for the commercial success, you do it for the art, for the job well done, and because you wouldn't do anything else.
It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs, and people like Steve Jobs need people like Woz. Steve moved on to actively search for, find and collaborate with as many people like Woz as he could. Unfortunately for us Woz never moved on, but then maybe he did what he needed to do.
> It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs, and people like Steve Jobs need people like Woz.
The former is truly unlikely and the latter is desperately true but omits the context completely and paints things in an almost pleasant light which frankly seems wrong to me.
It turns out that people like Woz have a completely different metric for things like happiness and success than people like Jobs. If Jobs had been hit by a bus before Woz met him, Woz would have gone on to have as long and happy a life as he's had because he'd still have made cool stuff and that makes him happy (something most of us, I would guess, can grok). He wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever have had a problem getting work doing fun stuff because talented people are rare and so tend not to have that problem. And he'd probably have made enough money to be comfortably well-off, he might even have struck it rich, but it wouldn't have been a necessary condition for him to be happy and fulfilled.
On the other hand, had Woz been hit by a bus, Jobs probably wouldn't even be a footnote in history at this point and would have died miserable because his metric appears to have used the accumulation of wealth as the definition of success and happiness; and he wasn't capable of building things without guys like Woz. Guys like Jobs, without guys like Woz, are generally just unproductive drains on society. Wooo, you had a long-term vision for a new product. Yes, you're special. Because nobody else ever watched star trek and then thought a tablet computer would be neat. Nobody ever read or watched science fiction and thought to try to make the gadgets described in there.
Yeah, right. I know who I'd point my son at as a role model, and it's not Jobs.
> It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs
Nope. Woz gives every impression that he'd be perfectly happy inventing stuff, rich or not. He doesn't really need a Steve Jobs, and the exploitation by someone who presented himself as a friend mostly seems to have caused him a lot of heartache.
> And made him richer than you or I can ever dream of,
That's the whooshing sound as a point goes over your head. You obviously care about that. Jobs obviously cares about that. It is nopt obvious Woz cares about that at all.
