We all know that Steve Jobs did not found Apple alone: he did it together with Steve Wozniak. As time went by, Jobs remained the great image of the company.
Steve Wozniak was the promoter of the first personal computer. That idea is yours. QBut the special association made with the brand is with Steve Jobs.
Because?
Steve Wozniak referred to the topic in 2020, on Guy Kawasaki’s podcast, cited by CNBC.
Before the launch of Apple Computers Inc. in 1976, Wozniak and Jobs were just friends who shared a love of electronics, concerts and pranks. “We had a lot of fun times,” The Woz recalled in conversation.
But something changed the day Apple received its first bank loan. It was 250 thousand dollars, the equivalent of 1.1 million dollars today.
“Steve suddenly changed. I didn’t want to talk about jokes, about fun things for children. Just business suits on magazine covers, talking about business and learning about it,” Wozniak said.
“He focused on developing his personal brand and becoming a kind of ‘different presence’ in the world. That’s when his personality changed and he became somewhat strict.”
There it was strengthened Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck and jeans, in addition to the man with the tough personality, who ended up fired by Apple in 1985, investing in NeXT and Pixar, and returning to the apple company in the 90s.
But Steve Wozniak remained the shy engineer, the man behind the paraphernalia. In a 2010 interview, he defined himself: “I’m a bad marketer. I was a total engineer.”
Former Apple employee Joe Shelton, a writer later for HuffPost, Apple News and Forbes, noted that Woz and Steve were “very different in terms of personality and what they really contributed to the company.”
“Woz was a technical genius and, like most engineers, “I worked head down designing,” Shelton noted, saying that he never got the impression that he was “really interested in getting any kind of mainstream recognition.”
For his part, Jobs was “very well known for the things that consumers undoubtedly know (…) He was a product person who quickly “He understood exactly what the markets would like or not like.”
The world appreciates the work of each one of them.