Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreeme

Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers to this question: I'm amazed that there's even a debate about this. He couldn't sit down and write code, or debug a PCB. That's fine. I don't need or even want my executives to be the best engineers in the house. I want them to respect and understand engineering and work in tandem with us. Jobs was exactly the right sort of "technical" for management and the C-level: he was able to understand the pros and cons of technical details and, rather often, make good predictions about where things were going. (He was also frequently a jerk, if not outright abusive, and I don't condone that -- but that's a separate matter entirely from his technical chops or lack thereof) I can think of plenty of calls he made that I disagreed with. Some were bad calls, period. Other calls were "correct" for what he was trying to achieve, but I didn't agree with what he was trying to achieve. Other times, he was simply too ambitious, pushing some software vision before hardware had quite caught up. But I've never seen an example of him simply failing to sufficiently understand the hardware or software.