I read the Jobs biography cover to cover, and I'm going to stop you right there, no. The guy who couldn't engineer an Atari game and ripped off his friend's work instead is not an engineer, and the idea that he had any kind of empathy for anyone is frankly hilarious.
He had good taste, and he was a tyrant. In most cases these traits amount to mediocrity. Jobs was in the right place at the right time, in any other situation he'd have been a middle manager at best.
He wasn't an engineer (for the most part), but he was a designer, of sorts. I don't think he was just "at the right place at the right time", and I don't think the iPod or iPhone would exist without him.
I say most of this based on the Bio, by the way. It seems we came out of that book with very different impressions.
The thing that made him different was his foundation in the humanities, and his good business sense.
If anything his ultimate fate was ridiculous luck if not for his own stupidity. Iirc, he had an extremely rare form of curable pancreatic cancer, but because of his own stupid choices he didn't survive it. Which strikes me as kind of fitting for a man like him.
Maybe there's more to him.
> Maybe there's more to him.
That makes him an excellent manager. Which he was. Clearly he was a world class CEO.
What does that have to do with him being an engineer?
Look, Steve Jobs was an integrator. He integrated people. He got the record companies integrated with computers. He got detail-focused engineers working with lateral-thinking designers. He was an asshole with little patience for idiots, and was hard to work with. He paid attention when customers said something sucked and got the right people involved.
I think Tim Cook is just over his head a little. And a new generation (or generations) of apple employees has taken over and lessons learned have been forgotten again.
I don't know, the mac pro is ridiculously expensive. I think the $400 wheels and almost $1000 for a monitor stand is just stupid marketing. It says that people should blindly pay what we ask instead of considering value.
Personally, I wish they would bring the value back. When they switched to intel, all of a sudden they were the best mac on the planet and the best pc on the planet too. They were competing.
Now it's just different.
As a counterpoint, he was a good neighbour [1]. The guy had some serious issues with the way he treated people, and he may have had a personality disorder, but it's a bit extreme to think he had no empathy for any other human being.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/steve-j...
Edit: whoops! This was the wrong link. Here is the article I had in mind (it's been years since I read it and apparently there are multiple neighbour stories about Jobs):
https://patch.com/california/paloalto/my-neighbor-steve-jobs
At one point, I lived across the street from a guy whose "front yard" was basically a loading dock. He was not considered a good neighbor, except by the guy down the street. Whose property included a house that apparently hadn't been painted or roofed for maybe a century. And who spent much of his time drinking beer, sitting on his porch. Often with the other guy.
They hosted great parties, though. One time, they had a live band, with a sound system on a trailer. Too many iffy bikers, though. Fights, and occasional gunfire.