“In 1976, Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in a Silicon Valley garage,” Catherine Clifford reports for CNBC. “In the three months February, March and April, the iPhone and Macintosh computer maker reported quarterly earnings of $58 billion, according to its April 30 financial statement.”
“Wozniak designed Apple’s first products, the Apple I and II computers,” Clifford reports. “Wozniak says there were really two counterintuitive factors that meaningfully contributed to his innovation at Apple,” Clifford reports. “‘Everything I did at Apple that was an A+ job and that took us places, I had two things in my favor,’ Wozniak said: In the beginning, he had a tight budget, and he’d never done such things before… While some education and training is important, according to Wozniak, what’s more crucial is to be able to think creatively.”
“Wozniak says it was because of his relative inexperience that he didn’t have ‘normal’ expectations, and that gave him a competitive edge. As a result the disks and computers he designed used a fraction of the chips others did at the time,” Clifford reports. “‘If I had had experience, I would have designed things with 50 chips instead of eight chips,’ Wozniak said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Woz: A true engineering genius.
If you haven’t read it already, we highly recommend Woz’s book: I, Woz.
“Woz: A true engineering genius.”. Absolutely and a person that i believe Apple does not acknowledge and respect enough today. They have to name a structure at the new campus after him. Not doing so is disgraceful… he does not have to die to get the respect and acknowledgment….
NO Woz .. No Apple today Tim !
“Wozniak designed Apple’s first products…..”..
Tkind of misleading way of putting it Imo!…. better stated as. ‘ Apple was formed around the products WOZ designed. (Woz products led to Apple ..Not the other way around)
Woz is a waste of breath. Hasn’t done anything in decades. Had it not been for Steve Jobs, Woz would have been the guy people know to get hacked cable boxes from.
You cant contain the jealousy ha ! 👎
That’s like a 12 year olds insult. Go ahead and list Woz’s contributions to the tech industry in the last 25 years. Good for him he’s loaded, still makes him useless at this point. He’s just a Fact guy riding around on a segway. Sad you can’t see that or who was the real driving force behind Apple.
So you don’t know about the WIM and later the SWIM chips that Apple kept using into the very late 90s (long after Woz left Apple) just because the chips were so elegant that no one dared touch them. It really was a matter of, “If it’s not broken, don’t ‘fix’ it.”
Also just to name one company, Woz was the chief scientist at Fusion-io for several years helping to lead that company into new ways of doing much faster (sometimes record setting) I/O and storage systems.
Shadow you mean the late 90’s when Apple nearly went out of business? It was broken and good thing Steve came back and not only touched but turned it upside down.
Woz gets hired for name recognition, not skill set. His time has come and gone lone again. You know Fusion- io was a disaster with Woz there and is listed as another victim of the “Curse of Woz”. Go ahead and google it and see how foolish you look.
Fact is, he’s fat, and that’s why he needs to segue into a Segway at all times. Just avoid cliff faces like Dean Kamen, who, c’mon, came off over a cliff like, all over it. Kersplat.
I happen to agree. Sure Woz was there at the start of Apple, but I see zero reason whatsoever to hold him on a pedestal still today. Most of what he says about Apple (for years) amounts to little more than finger pointing and criticism. Woz seems more of the “counterculture” type (always try to go in any other direction than that of the crowd) than being some truly original thinker to me.
By that logic, Jobs has been gone 8 years and the stock only reached its peak under Tim Cook’s watch, so you’d see zero reason whatsoever to hold him on a pedestal still today.
Cook on a pedestal for riding the Jobs iPhone gravy train? He is inferior to Woz whom created Apple. Get a grip…
You’d be wrong about that. Steve was one of a kind and still is.
Steve wasn’t running around saying Apple sucks like Woz does pretty much all the time. That’s the crux of why I don’t much care for the Woz walks on water brigade.
Woz is taking about Apple today and he is correct. It sucks compared to Steve steering Apple. Please Me. Cook, we are breathless waiting for oodles more animated Skeuomorphism emojis. Mac Pros are passé, we have Photoshop on our iPads. Yeah, right.
Apple owner since my Lisa…
Sorry, this can go both ways. Woz takes it for granted that he knew what he was doing. At that time, there was no ‘market’. This is not so with young, modern engineers. They ignore precedent and research at their own peril, and they ignore it all the time. He is out of touch, and it won’t help us today. It would be like asking Alexander Graham Bell to make sense of wireless plans without knowing what a wireless plan is. Kudos to him, but Woz is very, very wrong on this one.
Woz would not have to have intimate knowledge of current technology to be a visionary leader as Apple CEO.
Woz was never a visionary. That was Steve Jobs.
What use is vision if you can’t get to what you see? Waz got Apple there.
Exactly right. Getting there is more important than dreaming. Woz is a visionary in his own right and built the foundation of the biggest company in history. Difficult to top that awesome achievement and for that reason, I could not care less what he has been doing, or has not been doing for years. He certainly DESERVES an area of the spaceship renamed and dedicated to him. When he passes and the historical accolades roll in it will most likely happen …
Back in the mid 90’s, the US organization I worked with in Japan did some demographic research. I made the comment that in spite of the “educational” status of Japanese, I had found a surprising number of office and business people who did not finish college. I was laughed at. Then after their study and research, they found a surprising number did not have a college degree. The reason was – large companies would have job fairs and regularly hire juniors and even some sophomores to jobs before they graduated. The companies wanted to get them while they were still moldable into the the company’s culture and way of thinking.
Woz understands!