With respect to your last paragraph, that's because Jobs doesn't really fit the mould that we "construct" as humans when trying to understand other people. In

With respect to your last paragraph, that's because Jobs doesn't really fit the mould that we "construct" as humans when trying to understand other people. In general, tech industry leaders should be able to manage context-switching between technical and non-technical decision-making, but very few leaders can excel at it, if their life were to depend on it. This is why we have very few of them like Andy Grove, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs & Elon Musk. A lot of engineers do not consider Steve Jobs to be technical partially because he was admitted to study a non-technical degree (unlike Andy, Jeff or Elon) and partially because of the way he is documented to have ripped off engineers he has worked with. The reasoning is if he was capable of doing the work himself, why hire someone else to do it or at least devalue their work in a way he wouldn't like to be treated? Also in tech, we generally fall into two buckets: technical and non-technical, but Jobs as a person didn't neatly fit into either bucket as evidenced by this description taken from Wikipedia. It aptly describes Jobs in a way that different writers fail to do: He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider. This phenomenon, in IMHO, is why a lot of writers explain his contributions from the perspective they are most familiar with. A non-technical writer trying to extol his virtues as a business leader will generally not be qualified to speak about his technical leadership abilities, causing readers to think his technical skills are average at best (or even non-existent, similar to his contemporaries in business). The converse is true.