I've always kinda suspected this just because so many execs seem to have time to be on multiple boards, CEO of whatever, head of some charity, advisor to some startup they have a stake in, et c., all at once, and "they work a lot" can't explain all of that.
Hold on. You say not true but then you say he did dip his fingers in an unpredictable way.... Of course perhaps you meant he didn't dip his fingers into everything at the same time... Well of course he didnt... he did dip his fingers into random things and eventually over time it led to him basically touching almost every aspect of the company.
No. He went off on the color of plastic, the radius of curvature of a housing, the color of the resin in a circuit board. He had no concept of the control of electrical noise in the read head of a disk drive, but almost everything in the company was more like that than the damn plastic. He flattered himself that he controlled everything, and nobody contradicted him, but it was both delusory, and a damn nuisance when he did notice some detail to bother people over.
My phone is different from an iphone in literally millions of ways, some thousands of which Jobs could conceivably have perceived, but very, very few of them are better for his attention to them, and in many of them my phone is objectively better.
