(a lot of people would pick Jobs for that, but I think he's more complicated. he wasn't technical himself, but he was able to understand what projects were at the right intersection of technical feasibility and market value pretty well, basically very good at whatever skill you think PMs have)
That is correct. He had unparalleled judgement about when specific instantiations of technology were ready for consumer markets.
Jobs's killing of the Apple Newton was objectively flawlessly correct judgement that SV's current crop of mediocre imitators flagrantly lack.
The Apple III was his only genuinely huge product error.
Jobs had remarkable ability to resist sunk costs fallacy, which currently rules SV. Possibly a result of his detour through NeXT.
Also, people forget that Jobs did not make most of his fortune at Apple or Next. He made it at Pixar.
I remember him (1) killing the floppy (2) killing the optical drive (3) moving the entire install base over to OSX (4) moving the entire install base over to x86 and everyone complained bitterly each time but these were all correct calls
I'm not sure the headphone jack was the right call or I would have put it on here lol
I usually use wireless earphones but miss the 3.5 jack for a variety of reasons.
I was a 3.5mm stereo maximalist for a long time and even I now hail our USB-C overlords. Basically I think it was the correct call but only because of the grace of European regulators
getting everything on USB-C is a massive quality of life win
It's annoying how much mini and micro USB stuff I still have.