Steve Wozniak

To dissipate heat, they added a heavy aluminum case, but it couldn't keep up.

Integrated circuits would physically expand and pop out of their sockets.

Screens displayed garbage.

Systems crashed constantly.

Sometimes floppy disks came out of the drive visibly melted.

Apple's official technical support advice became legendary.

When customers called about system failures, technicians would tell them to lift the front of the computer three to six inches off their desk and drop it.

The physical shock might reset the loose chips.

The official fix for the computer worth thousands of dollars was to drop it on your desk.

To Wozniak, the cause was simple.

The Apple III had been designed by the marketing department and not by the engineers.

Jobs had pushed his aesthetic vision without regard for technical feasibility, something he would do over and over again, and often it worked out.

The case was finalized before the motherboard, forcing engineers to cram immature technology into a space that was too small.

This was the complete opposite of the Apple II.

The Apple II started with brilliant engineering and built the product around what worked.

The Apple III started with how it should look and forced the engineering to comply.

This is a tension that still exists today.

What made it painful for Woz was that his Apple II was thriving.

While the Apple III failed, the Apple II was becoming the best-selling computer in the world.

And it wasn't because of Apple's marketing.