The engineering work was far simpler then. A single person can reasonably understand the whole of how an Apple II computer is designed and works, end to end. A

The engineering work was far simpler then. A single person can reasonably understand the whole of how an Apple II computer is designed and works, end to end. A small team of such people interacted in highly productive ways to iterate that innovation, yielding many interesting tales. The iPhone is many orders of magnitude more complex. It took thousands of engineers to design and build it, each working on a tiny piece. Entire subsystems (e.g. the modem chip) are wholly outsourced to other companies. There are no people who understand fully how more than a small piece of it works. The yield is a series of sprint planning meetings. Apple was also a much smaller company then, steeped in the (unthinkable today) openness of 70s/80s compute culture. Apple itself grew out of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist meetup where people swapped designs and technical information freely. "Doing interesting engineering things with computer designs" was perceived as a very small niche of purely technical interest to a few geeks and nerds. The culture around the engineering wasn't at all locked down with NDAs and battallions of lawyers - why bother, the economic value of the technical information was seen as marginal and not worth bothering over. How times change!