Wozniak was the real guy behind Apple. He was the tech brains, while Jobs dealt with business/corporate end.
As a tech and innovation guy, Jobs was not that shiny. And of course, when it came time for the mac platforms, what they did was more or less copy work by Xerox.
To start with, perhaps but the history of Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of “tech” brilliant companies that didn’t have the business side.
It was actually quite an improvement over the Xerox work, with several new concepts. There was also genius in getting a GUI to run well in a $2,500 machine instead of the $50,000+ hardware Xerox had theirs running on.
Uh, no. They visited PARC for a total of 16 hours, took no code, and were not allowed to take notes. Apple also PAID Xerox $1,000,000 in pre-IPO common stock, which Xerox later sold after the Apple IPO for $7 million... had they kept it, it would be worth BILLIONS today... for the rights to anything they saw on their visits.
The Apple Mac GUI is not by any stretch of the imagination copy of the smalltalk GUI of XEROX. You can look at comparisons of the two and the differences are quote striking. Apple made many innovations that are completely lacking in the XEROX GUI, such as overlapping windows, draggable windows that stay visible instead of just becoming outlines outlines during the move, drop down, hierarchical menus, Menu bars, Dragable icons, ACTIVE document icons that you can drag an app icon that opens the app, etc., and even the trashcan metaphor for deleting files. Even having folders and files in folders was an Apple invention.
There was FAR LESS copying than the myths promulgated around this than most people are lead to believe.
Woz wanted to just give everything away. Which would have resulted in no Apple as we know it.
Apple licensed some work from Xerox who was too stupid to know what they had. But there was a hell of a lot more to the first Mac.