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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 pr

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.

Hovertruck 16y ago
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.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  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.
joezydeco 16y ago
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.

Hovertruck 16y ago

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.

dieterrams 16y ago
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.

joezydeco 16y ago

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.