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Comment by Hovertruck | Hacker News Reader

I doubt I'm smart enough to work for Apple, but I doubt I'd ever want to. Why?

Everything the company does is something done "single-handedly" by Steve Jobs. Steve may be the driving force of the company and have great insight into what people want/need/etc. But he has a great team to actually implement what he wants, and Apple as a company are the ones who restructured an industry.

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This isn't Steve Jobs' doing. I don't know how far back it goes, but whenever Jobs does these presentations, he lets the people in charge of various projects present them. So Scott Forstall presents new platform features. The guy who redesigned iMovie presented that. Same for the iWork suite on the iPad. Jonathan Ives also gets plenty of credit for being Apple's resident industrial design genius. They're even more prominent in the videos Apple puts out, and Jobs isn't even in those.

Now all the people who work under these guys aren't getting the spotlight, but this is the norm pretty much everywhere.

I know that Jef Raskin is frequently cited as the real father of the Macintosh, and Jobs probably failed to give him his due. That was a much younger Steve Jobs, though.

Well to be fair, I never blamed it on Steve himself. And while it's normal for the lower level guys to not get recognition, usually it's while the company is being recognized ("Microsoft releases...", "Nokia develops new..."), whereas with Apple it's usually attributed to Jobs himself.

I think that's because whenever Apple releases a major new product, it's Jobs who personally announces it in a high-profile presentation. And because Jobs is well known as the CEO of Apple, the press prefers to simply state that Jobs announced or introduced the product. Partly because it's more factually accurate, and partly because Jobs is less abstract an entity than Apple while just as familiar, which is always preferred in writing for large audiences.

Other companies, in contrast, don't have well known CEOs and/or their CEOs don't bother to personally do the announcing. It seems like most tech products get announced with a press release. Maybe there's a press kit if they want to get fancy.

Jobs (forcibly?) took over the Mac project from Raskin, and Raskin took a leave of absence from Apple in 1981.

I'm guessing Raskin wasn't on Steve's mind at the launch.

I hear ya, but it's part of his job - he is the figurehead for the company. If you've watched any of the major stevenotes especially the iPhone, you will notice he graciously thanks all of the teams and team leaders that worked on the product. The press also likes to give him the spotlight whether he wants it or not.

Maybe someone can answer this better than I, but does Steve Jobs name go on every Apple patent?

Here is an article which lists at least some of the Steve Jobs patents:

http://technologizer.com/2009/05/28/the-patents-of-steve-job...

Not at all. There are lots of Apple patents without his name.

A good friend of mine retired (an Apple Fellow at the end of his career in graphics) with a good bunch of patents with his name on them (along with many others in various groupings). I don't think Jobs was on most of them.

Right, ok.

Maybe you can point to ANY other industry in the world, any other company, where all the people who worked on a project get praised, or even mentioned. Maybe some newspaper article, where anyone besides the CEO, or if you are lucky the top management team are described.

In fact, just show me any writing anywhere, doesn't even have to be a newspaper, where everyone else is mentioned?

Why, because it is ridiculous and stupid to ask that.

Steve Jobs was the one pushing the iPhone, he was the one that didn't back down when getting the usual shit from the carriers, like everybody did before him. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, they all bowed down before the carriers, changed stuff on their phones, had annoying splash screens and apps. That was Steve Jobs, not engineer 118b.

> Everything the company does is something done "single-handedly" by Steve Jobs.

Would you like to see a rolling list of the names of all Apple engineers every time you turned your iPhone on or off?

No, but I'd love for it to have a "Credits" app.

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