Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs delivers this with the casual finality of an obituary while the subject is still very much alive. “Woz is living his own life now” sounds generous, almost affectionate, but it also draws a clean border: the co-founder has been gently escorted out of the present tense of Apple. The line performs a kind of managerial severance, turning a messy human relationship into a neat corporate timeline: five years absent, case closed.

The subtext is classic Jobs: history is the currency, and he positions himself as its narrator. By conceding that “what he did will go down in history,” Jobs offers Wozniak the highest compliment he can give while still keeping the spotlight on Apple as an ongoing drama led by someone else. It’s praise that doubles as containment. Woz gets the past; Jobs keeps the future.

Context matters because Apple’s founding mythology is a two-person story that later became a one-man brand. Wozniak built the scrappy engineering miracle; Jobs built the temple around it, complete with a storyline audiences could remember. This quote subtly reinforces that division of labor: the inventor as origin story, the CEO as author of the legend.

It works because it’s emotionally ambivalent. There’s warmth in the acknowledgement, but also a quiet power move: to “go down in history” is to be safely filed away. Jobs isn’t dismissing Woz; he’s canonizing him, which is another way of saying: thank you, and goodbye.