John Stafford talked with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who many consider the father of the personal computer, for The Cardinal Inquirer. “Woz” designed Apple’s earliest computers, bringing advances like a color display to consumers at a relatively low price. His Apple II was so popular it made Apple in the ’80s the fastest growing company in American history. Stafford’s interview with Woz resulted in some very interesting exchanges:

Stafford: If you could redesign one thing, either today or along the way, what would that be?
Woz: I would try to take us back to the early Macintosh, the failed Lisa-type thinking of philosophies that the human is the center of the world and the computer gets designed around that person, with very good understanding of here is how people live their lives. There’s a set of rules that we are going to enforce and follow for our software. Everything is going to be very consistent, very simple, and very obvious to that human. I wish we could go back to that, because we had it and we lost it.

Stafford: Do you think [record companies setting the prices for online music] at all similar to the computer industry, where engineers develop a product and someone else sets the price?
Woz: It’s very much like that, but sometimes the engineers are – yeah, no, I think it’s very similar, very similar. Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they’re doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don’t know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don’t work. The most things that are left out because they aren’t finished. The most things that are inconsistent with the way they did their last program. I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

Stafford: You think so?
Woz: Oh yeah. I get third-party stuff and it’s almost always just better, cleaner and more understandable. It works better and does what you’d expect instead of, you know, buggy things or not what you expect.

Stafford: What’s an example?
Woz: I couldn’t give you an example. It happens just all the time. Over and over and over.

Is OS X is problematic in that way?
Woz: I don’t even call it a problem; it’s just something you learn to work around. It’s like, there was such a cleaner, good approach to it and they did this stupid thing. But remember, the people who wrote the OS X weren’t the people who developed the Lisa and Macintosh. Those guys are gone.

Stafford: Is it difficult having started this phenomenon of a company any maybe not agreeing with some of its decisions?
Woz: Oh no, I agree with it so much. There’s just a few areas that are my own values cause me to be a perfectionist, but I do not go criticizing Apple very much at all. I mean, no, I love every part of the Apple world. You can look with your eyes and just see that it always has – every version of Macintosh, including the PowerBooks – the most beautiful product quality and they generally tend to lead the others in terms of qualities you like — thinness, size of screen, pixels on the screen. The whole world of Apple works together.

Do you think we’ll see OS X on non-Apple boxes in the future?
Woz: No, I don’t. Apple has been very adamant and has stuck by their guns for a long, long time and they put everything at risk in the company many times to basically say that we’re going to be a proprietary operating system and you’re going to have to buy our hardware to run it. Apple has treated itself more like a hardware company than a software company, even though it really is the Macintosh operating system that makes it different.

Full interview, in which Stafford and Woz also discuss DRM and more, here.
Without specific examples, it’s difficult to comment on Woz’s “I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple” statement. In the full interview, Woz does say that he’s “pretty much tied to one operating system, the Macintosh, using it day in day out,” so he’s not really comparing Apple software in relation to software from others or on other platforms, just criticizing Apple software vs. third-party Mac software. So, Woz is really praising third-party Mac developers’ work vs. Apple in specific cases that go unmentioned in the interview.

Interestingly, last November, Woz was quoted by CRN’s Steven Burke In an interview at the 8th annual CRN Industry Hall of Fame event at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, Calif., as saying that “Apple is the best, bar none, at developing technology that ‘fits how a human being is and thinks. I still see that going on at Apple more than any other company in the world.’” Full article here.

Surely, many MacDailyNews readers have specific examples of Apple Mac software issues and suggestions for improvement. Please share them below.

Advertisements: The New iMac G5. Built-in camera and remote control. From $1299. Free shipping.
Apple USB Modem. Easily connect to the Internet using your dial-up service. $49.00.
The New iPod with Video. The ultimate music & video experience on the go. From $299. Free shipping.
Connect iPod to your television set with the iPod AV Cable. Just $19.00.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
Woz: Apple creates products that ‘that feel special and fit how a human being thinks’ – November 18, 2004