Yes. They actually made similar observations about each other, in that Bill is observing that Steve has a genius for marketing and picking clever people, as opposed to any particular knack for innovation or inventiveness of his own. But Bill is so much more gracious about how he says it and doesn't take anything away from Steve. He's genuinely impressed at how Steve has managed to somehow wrangle a seemingly impossible licensing deal from a famously obstinate cartel of rent-seekers.
Given his similar life experience Jobs could smell his own.
Woz and an endless stream of actual engineers developed Apple hardware.
Steve just focused on minutiae and details he cared about. He could not engineer his way out of a wet paper sack he would be too stuck on the color of the sack.
And the engineers likely had no taste or vision. Takes both types to make something great. Steve could synergize and extract greatness from teams of individuals. On their own, they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substantial.
I feel like at least some of Steve’s later personality has to have been influenced by interactions such as the one with Bill Atkinson, where he was told rounded corners were "incredibly difficult" to program, only to come up with an implementation a mere 24 hours later. A lifetime of such interactions, such as the one with Larry Kenyon, might have taught him that people aren’t going to do anything (unless he really really insists) and consistently lie to him.
What is the basis of assuming "they would have just tooled around and not produced anything substanial"? Seems like something Jobs would like you to think but come on, Apple has been a massive company for every long, there is an army of people working on "vision" not Jobs just connecting to the cosmos and figuring out everything like an oracle. There is the man and then there is the hype, and i think most fall for the hype over the man.
To be fair, the Apple Vision Pro is absolutely amazing hardware. It may not quite have found product market fit, but the hardware itself is something else.
