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Comment by IdeaHamster | Hacker News Reader

Speculation on Steve Jobs' successor strikes me as, well, pointless. The dynamic that drives Apple today is very much the same dynamic that drove it at the start: Woz and Jobs. We saw, in the late 80s and early to mid 90s what happens when the "Jobs" half of that dynamic is not there. The "Woz" dynamic, however, has had a good line of succession to cary it forward the entire time. Looking forward, it seems pretty clear that with a few more years of grooming and practice on stage that Scott Forestall will replace Jobs and keep that part of the company moving forward. Astute observers, however, would also be focusing on Federighi. It seems less clear to me that he will be able to carry on Woz's legacy...but I could be wrong.

Apple with Jobs, but without Woz, is just an empty suit...a really, really well hand tailored $6000 fine Italian 3-piece suit...but still just a suit

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I feel as though you're assuming facts not in evidence, here.

Can you explain a little bit more what legacy you feel Steve Wozniak has left at Apple that persists to this day, along with why it has been important to the company's success?

My analysis of Apple's latter day success:

- Steve Jobs, demanding a high standard of quality and providing vision for ongoing products and strategy. Selecting and grooming smart people for crucial leadership roles. Requiring accountability and virtuous integration between product components and even different products.

- Tim Cook, optimizing industrial and business processes, ensuring high margins, protecting profits and structuring clever, unmatched deals for manufacturing and supply sourcing

- Jonathan Ive, designing the physical incarnations of Apple that create strong connections to the brand for customers

So is your position that software engineering has had an equally critical role to what's described above, and the engineering leadership has been Woz-esque? While Apple does make world-class software, I'm not sure I agree about the Woz bit, but I'm open to a persuasive argument.

edit: Especially when you consider how much of Apple's software engineering assets and talent came from NeXT.

Woz's lineage is in the overall engineering talent. Woz himself was no longer a major part of the company by the time the Mac was designed. Guys like Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, and Bill Atkinson were three of Woz's (many) successors already. It's not down to any individual exec to carry on Woz's legacy, because Woz was never an executive, not even an engineering executive. He only wanted to be an engineer. There are thousands of successors to Woz, and perhaps not a single successor to Jobs in the whole company.

> There are thousands of successors to Woz

That alone means a lot of authority. Woz embodies half of Apple's soul - the brilliantly unique hardware. It's true his half has been taken care by his successors, but it's still his half, although I suspect the PC-ness of current Macs would be offensive to him and he being on board would be our only chance of seeing an elegant x86-based computer, ever.

That said, he wouldn't probably be a good CEO. But he could be brought on board as an advisor. Apple has grown into a vastly different company since the Apple II days, but there is nobody else who can personify what Apple is all about.

Interestingly enough, every interview I see with him is mostly Apple-centric. Although he doesn't work there for about 24 years, this shows how closely associated with Apple he is in the eyes of the public.

> I suspect the PC-ness of current Macs would be offensive to him and he being on board would be our only chance of seeing an elegant x86-based computer, ever.

In what ways do you find the iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Air et al. to be inelegant or PC-like?

Every x86 box has, unless I am very wrong, an ISA bus buried somewhere in the chipset. Deep down there, you may find a functionally complete IBM 5150 PC. I wouldn't be surprised if, somehow, you could trick the video hardware into emulating a CGA (or an MDA text mode).

If you ever had the chance, take a look into the schematics of a 5150 and compare how clumsy, inefficient and plain inelegant it is when compared to a years-older Apple II. Then you will fully understand why I hold x86-computers in such low esteem.

And yes, I am typing this on a x86 laptop. I'd love to have an option.

It's no secret that x86 is an inelegant architecture. There was no shortage of RISC CPU architectures in the 90's designed to dethrone x86. Windows NT was even written to run on two of them (DEC Alpha and PowerPC). Apple and IBM carried this experiment forward the longest, but it didn't work out that way.

No it didn't because economies of scale took their toll. Still, it would be possible to build an elegant Mac around an x86 processor, but Apple would have to design and manufacture their own chipset. Nothing would make the CPU elegant, but, at least, the rest of the computer wouldn't be this mess.

But then Macs wouldn't be able to boot Windows. When that becomes irrelevant, we may see change.

Minor nitpick: Windows NT has been ported to MIPS, PPC, Alpha and Itanium, and was originally developed for the Intel 860 (though that version was never sold). Legend says there were Intergraph Clipper and SPARC ports too. If Microsoft pulls off the ARM release of Windows 8, that will be one more architecture with a Windows NT port.

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