“At the Apps World North America conference in San Francisco, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak gave WIRED a wide-ranging interview, touching on everything from his preferred iPhone 5s color (he has all three) to the fictional operating system in the movie Her,” Mat Honan reports for Wired. “But his most interesting comment by far was a heretical recommendation for his former company: Apple, he thinks, should release an Android handset.”
Honan reports, ““There’s nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market,” said Wozniak–who, it should be noted, is no longer involved in the day-to-day workings of the company.”
MacDailyNews Take: Hmm, wonder why?
Wozniak continued, “‘We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time,'” Honan reports. “Despite how that suggestion might sound, Wozniak was generally bullish on his former company, rejecting the notion that innovation at Apple has stalled out.”
“When asked about Apple’s much-remarked-on failure last year to introduce a new category–such as a smartwatch or TV, both long rumored to be in the works–Woz countered that he believes Apple is waiting for the right time to release the right product,” Honan reports. “‘The great products really come from secret development,’ he said. ‘You put small teams of great people on them and they aren’t bothered by other people commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it. A whole new category of products doesn’t happen very often. It might happen once a decade. Sometimes you have to wait for one of those to come about.'”
“He also endorsed Apple’s decision not to pour new features into the iPhone, arguing that feature creep is not the same as innovation. ‘If you have something really good, don’t change it; don’t screw it up,’ he said,” Honan reports. “‘People don’t really choose their smartphones based on features,’ he added. ‘I think Apple is superior at being able to say no.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As always, we love Woz!
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Apple co-founder Woz announced as opening keynote speaker at Apps World in San Francisco – January 27, 2014
HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!
Wait a min….. He might be on to something.
Why not have a Bootcamp for the iPhone. We have one for the Mac. If it’s ok to run windows on a Mac then why not Bootcamp the iPhone and run Android and iOS at the same time on a phone? The phone that runs both windows and Android. Of course an iTunes app for the android will be needed.
Right. The iPhone, which Apple keeps as simple as possible to use, should have boot camp. OOPS, wrong device niche. Go jailbreak your iPhone and bootcamp it yourself. Granny is NOT interested.
What disturbs me about Woz’s Android comment is his ignoring the VAST malware problem inherent with all things Android. Android is literally the single worst malware magnet we have ever seen in the operating system realm. Dare not disagree as I have the VAST numbers to back up that claim. Don’t I.
Theoretically, Apple could ‘garden wall’ Android as it does iOS. Except that Android is NOT designed to be secure at the core and iOS IS. The crap that would have to be overcome in Android to make it reliably secure is daunting.
One thing for sure: Apple is not going to be stupid enough to touch Android unless the security hell problem is solved first. That points out a very clear difference between Google and Apple.
No. He isn’t on to anything. Woz jumped the shark a long time ago.
All he cares about for some time is getting his mug in front of a camera and if he has to say retarded things to do that no problem.
This isn’t unreasonable in theory. Just don’t provide any instructions to consumers, let the hackers modify the phone as they want without breaking compatibility. Like iPod Linux.
Android has already been ported to iPhone anyway. Google it.
I want to believe he is somewhere reading these comments and laughing his rich as god ass off at us, but somehow I think he meant it.
I wanna smoke what he is smoking!!
me too
That’s what I was thinking, Woz…time to leave Colorado and go home.
Wow, Wozniak has really jumped the shark now!
Instead of jumping a blue shark, he jumped a megladon!
That Borowitz is such a great humorist! I just love reading his columns…wait…this is an actual article!
What a great idea! Didn’t some android integration work out really well for RIM/ Blackberry?
/s
Woz, please shut up!
Woz just lost ALL credibility with me (what little he had left).
Woz must have had some great drugs in the 70’s. He comes across as an idiot on crack.
This guy lost his mind a while back. He’s never going to find it again. I think it was when he said he wanted to install motion sensors on Kim Kardassian’s ass and Beyoncé’s ass and plot the relative daily motion and gravitational pull that I knew something was up.
there must have been a long break from people calling him to talk about apple, so he comes up with this crap. it must kill this guy he is not working at apple
Actually Woz is still employed by apple to this day and receives $120,000.00 a year from them. True story go look it up. He is also an apple stock holder as well.
But he is delusional. Some of his comments are so stupid one has to wonder if it was said in a drug induced haze.
Woz is rich and it’s obvious he is smoking some next-level herb that i don’t have access to
I started doing a long reply about why this was stupid, but gave up because it just is, and the stupidity of it speaks for itself.
Me too. This is so far beyond the stupidest things I could have imagined Woz saying. He dowsn’t just have zero business sense he has negative business sense. Talk about brand dilution. It’s no wonder no one else has thought of this.
After all these years, he still needs Steve around to slap sense in to him…
Doesn’t Woz realise that Apple already runs Android on its iPhone. It’s called iOS 7. Runs just as shittily as Android and looks just as shit.
I don’t wanna smoke what you’re smoking :/
Hahaha, you just love to roil the masses don’t you?!! There is a tag for statements like this. It is: /s
No it doesn’t, BLN.
You’re a jackass, and a boring troll. Go away.
can programmers get a pure linux phone that they can integrate themselves – it would not even be able to dial a number out of the box without having to download, install and integrate the API, having to makefile a package to integrate with their version of the “smartphone” linux? Oh, and a second package and drivers for the dial tones, too?
Yes, something like this could keep WOZ busy for days…
… which goes to show ya – you can be a genius in one area and a complete bimbo in others. It doesn’t make him a bad person. It’s just embarrassing for those who like him. Like he has big green boogers hanging out of his nose – but you can’t say anything – cuz he Woz and that’s just how he is.
Woz hit his head really hard in his plane crash back in 1981. Give him a break.
I’m shocked! You actually made a comment with no political overtones!! Kudos.
Lovable guy. Great engineer. But he is no tech visionary or a great business mind. He is just a really great engineer who got lucky in life by meeting Steve Jobs which helped him get rich and famous off of his brilliance instead of him just giving it away.
If Apple released an Android phone, no one else would be able to sell one. Goodbye, Samsung.
Please stop. You’re still an Apple Employee. If he keep talking stupid about Apple, quit and you can talk stupid all day long about Apple.
“Wozniak remains an employee of Apple and receives a stipend, estimated to be $120,000 per year.”
Woz – would be a disaster when it comes to running a company. He is way out there, and I think he actually needs no mood altering anythings to be there!
I wonder what the weather is like on his planet?
Woz did one thing that Jobs couldn’t do. He made an ass of himself in 2014.
Cheeky devil.
Ok man. I have let you have UR way and say not the most flattering things apple related because u did after all have a hand in building the company but now I’m going to need you to drink a tall glass of STFU!
Woz always was a practical joker. He knows Apple doesn’t make shit, and they’d no more ship an Android phone than they’d pre-install Windows on the iPad.
-jcr
We HOPE he was joking. He’s said some off-the-planet stuff plenty of times before.