> while Woz was technically employed at Apple until 1987

I think that Woz is actually still employed at Apple even today. According to both his personal website and autobiography he still takes a paycheck (Wikipedia says around $120k a year). Like you say though, he has no involvement at Apple anymore despite the salary.

That probably makes him technically the only Apple employee who's allowed to openly critique new product releases in public!

That effectively makes Woz responsible for 50% of Apple's success so far.

Well you can count any way you like if you absolutely want to make it so. But I count Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and the App Store as pretty good successes.

>>if you absolutely want to make it so.

I'm just stating history as is.

Apple I and II were something like what search business is for Google. They were basically their bread and butter for nearly the entire early years.

And Woz had almost entirely designed and built them. The products you mention are all large team products.

Look at it anyway. If you count for the individual efforts. Woz is way ahead of any one at Apple.

I think Jobs and Bricklin were at least as important for the success of the Apple II as Wozniak. Yes, Woz worked magic on the hardware and the software, allowing for an aggressive price for the feature set, but Jobs and Bricklin made that hardware enter the office; Jobs by insisting that that the case looked friendly (http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/design/apple2.html gives a nice overview), and Dan Bricklin by writing VisiCalc.

If Jobs and Bricklin hadn't been around, Woz' design might be a footnote in history, smaller than the Commodore Amiga.

Oh, so in your version of history, Apple had about as much success prior to 1981 as they did after? Interesting.