Woz on Apple: 'I'm a little afraid' | Hacker News Reader

Woz on Apple: 'I'm a little afraid'

news.cnet.com

148 pointsSato67 comments

"I can't go back"

Speaking as a man with friends and loved ones, not an Apple fan (per se), that really got me. Woz gets more than just Apple's direction: he gets what's important.

He wants one more dinner with his friend and that's really inspiring. It's hard to think there's a chance you'll outlive the people you love and I, for one, have decided mid-post to go seize those moments rather than type here. Ciao.

What an annoying reporter doing the interview. Ask an open-ended question and let him talk about it, don't constantly interrupt him and put words into his mouth...

I couldn't agree more. Woz is a guy who will talk forever if you give him the right cues. STFU and get out of his way.

It was excruciating to listen to the interviewer's little interjections. These little affirmations are what you're supposedly "supposed to do" in conversation, but boy does it sound _awful_ for an interview.

It was eye opening for me in this regard as well - know your setting.

I thought the questions were great, and I suspect you're being a little sexist and ageist. Sexist in that if Charlie Rose asked exactly the same questions with his Charlie Rose manner, you wouldn't be as upset, and ageist in that the interviewer was clearly quite young. Woz is a lifelong teacher, and is as dedicated to supporting young people learn as anyone, and you're here shitting on their work. She's not Oprah yet, because she's not 40 yet.

My hunch is that you are all objecting, in part, to the fact that a woman is interjecting and according to our cultural norms, women aren't supposed to do that. If a man was doing it, you'd care less. It's a hunch based on 30 years of listening to people, and I'm hopeful you or someone will take this suggestion seriously, although if history is any guide you'll interpret this as a personal attack, go into defense mode and deny any wrongdoing. Fun times.

Also worth noting is that neither TechCrunch nor C|net gave credit to this woman for doing the interview. That's great journalism there, fellas.

You scored a 2 out of 4 on the most common insults that are quickly losing their value: Racist, homophobe, sexist, ageist.

I don't think they're insults, but rather statements of (possible) fact. I'm aware of my sexism, living in a sexist society; have acted sexist and will continue to be sexist. It's like someone pointing out that I have bad habits when programming. Always useful to identify points of improvement. Especially in a male-dominated industry like software development, it's always something to reflect upon.

I think your speculation is too contaminated with a certain view you think society as a whole has.. it's quite.. immature. Also, I'm hopeful you don't take this comment seriously, although if history is any guide, you'll interpret this as a personal attack, go into defense mode and deny and wrongdoing. Fun times.

No, I take it to heart. I can't really say any more than my suspicions. None of us will really know the truth. I'm happy with that. I just want to put my suspicions out there. Thanks for your thoughts.

Sorry, you couldn't be further from the truth. I was objecting to her because she was bad, not because she's a young woman.

Also, as to the whole "taking it seriously" part: please don't confuse genuine disagreement (I think you're very, very wrong) with prejudice. I don't take your comment as a personal attack, but rather as grossly misguided. I'm not offended by the labels of sexism and ageism, principally because I think they have no merit.

There're plenty of young women who could have done a great job in this interview; she is not one of them.

Thanks for your reply. Like I said, all I have is my suspicions. I don't claim to know the truth. I don't think any of us really does.

However, when you say "you couldn't be further from the truth", is that the result of you rewatching the video, while considering the possibility that you might, in part, as I qualified from the beginning, be seeing her differently than you'd see a man? Or is it the result of your immediate reaction, because of your uninterruptable certainty that you surely would never do something so sexist?

Just curious. If you've genuinely considered the possibility, that's all I can reasonably ask. For my part, I'm happy to have raised my suspicion, even though HN obviously thinks quite lowly of this line of thought.

Not everything comes down to gender wars.

Isn't it best to judge someone not on the color of their skin or what they have in their pants, but by the quality of their work? If their work (in this case, an interview) is bad, then it's bad. It doesn't matter if the interviewer is 14 or 40, male or female.

A fanatic can't change his mind and won't change the subject. That's why every internet argument eventually turns into a debate about the merits of some popular fanaticism, be it libertarianism, feminism, or whatever else.

Man up and own your words. You went on for several paragraphs calling hkmurakami out for sexism and ageism, yet you now backpedal and claim not to know the truth and that nobody does. If you really believed that you would not have posted your original reply since you wouldn't have known the truth about what hkmurakami was thinking.

"I suspect"

"my hunch"

And I stand by it. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further (erik@snowedin.net) but I'm backpedaling on nothing. And all three of them of course were thinking totally innocent thoughts. Sexism is rarely conscious these days.

I suspect that you're an ass, and my hunch is that you're smug and self righteous.

That's not particularly helpful.

He claimed that sticking "I suspect" and "my hunch" in his comment meant that his comment wasn't an insult. I demonstrated how his claim was false.

For reference, Charlie did actually interview Woz here: http://www.charlierose.com/view/clip/11931

People weren't too keen on Rose's interruptions of Torvalds on this recent thread, either:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096121

TC has an addendum saying the woman asking the questions was just another member of the public, not a reporter. The interrupting (and misreading) of Wozniak does seem very callow.

> according to our cultural norms, women aren't supposed to do that.

I am quite sure not all of us share cultural norms.

Wow, and it waasn't techcrunch? Paul Carr's twin???

It might interest you to know that this is how women generally talk amongst themselves (not to other men). It's a skill and the Woz seems to be great at it. I feel he actually pushed the interviewer into this mode when he upped the emotional content to a very high level (not sticking to the usual male platitudes) and she was quite caught up by it. It was a moment of human connection. And I thoroughly enjoyed it too. Possibly most women would say this was an exciting interview and that a normal question answer thing would sound dull and boring to them in comparison.

I also wouldn't be surprised if the woman in the video felt a physical attraction to Woz and also felt a need to touch/hold him just to release the pressure of the emotions they were generating. I felt that too.

I really wanted to hear what he had to say but couldn't listen to that video for more than 2 minutes.

> quintessential engineer

If you have not yet read JL's interview of Woz in "Founders at Work", I encourage you to read it now. One of the best in her book.

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Awesome interview. Great excerpt:

"When you get very very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of. Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work?

Man, when I actually finally put together this little circuit and put some data into memory that should show up as color and it showed up color, it was just one of those eureka moments and you're just shaking inside. It was just unbelievable. Here we had it in just a couple of chips. I had color, and then I had graphics, and then I had hi-res, and then I had paddles and sound to put games into the machine. It had dynamic memory—it had the newest right type of dynamic memory that could expand almost forever. All sorts of slots with a little mini operating system that actually worked incredibly well. The Apple II was just one of those designs. Anybody could build things to add on to it, anybody could write programs, they could write sophisticated programs, they could write it in machine language, they could write it in my Basic. So that machine, there was just nothing stopping it."

Oh Woz, I'd wait in a line for days just to talk to you.

Being a technical man, I'm surprised in how he reacted to those 'technical terms' that were mentioned. Listening to this, I felt he knew exactly what Apple was/is and strives to be. If he still elicits respect from the current Apple camp, wouldn't he be a good choice to take over Steve Job's role? If not a CEO, an advisor? I say this not knowing a thing about corporate structure so excuse my ignorance.

If you are serious about wanting to connect with Woz he is remarkably accessible. He's a hopeless educator at heart - reach out to the guy.

http://twitter.com/#!/stevewoz

http://www.woz.com/unuson/index.html

I'm reading his book iWoz at the moment. In that he makes it clear he's never wanted to be a manager. He didn't/doesn't want to control other people etc. In fact, he only agreed to leave HP and join apple (after designing and building the apple I and II in his spare time) when he realized he could be in his own company and still stay as an engineer.

Reporter sounds very ersatz. Constantly interrupting, interjecting with "huh", "oh", "yeah", and "ah, interesting". She pretends to know what she's talking about, although it's obvious that she doesn't.

Anyways, the parallel to Sony is interesting. Many have mentioned it before, but only time will tell.

Haha my favorite part is around 2:35.

Woz: "...one mind still in control to keep products so..."

Interviewer: "Advancing?"

Woz: "small."

Good catch

Reporter? I assumed it was some random girl filming with an iPhone...

I sat next to Woz during the keynote where the iPod with video was introduced (I believe the event where Madonna was called, as I was working on her project at the time).

The guy had such enthusiasm for everything around him, especially while Steve was on stage. It was inspiring. He also had time for everyone, which was equally so.

I like to think of him as evangelist in chief. I mean, the guy checks in wherever he is on Foursquare and from what I understand is really kind to anyone that says hello.

I for one would love to see Woz back to Apple as an über-advisor. He is half of the company's soul and is the only person who can gather as much respect (and authority to say no) as Jobs could. He also seems to get Apple better than most. I agree completely with his objections on the technical aspects of the 4S presentation - people don't want to know of antenna switching. Just say "you can hold it anyway you want and it won't lose reception". People don't want to know about dual cores - just say it's a much faster processor that enables things that were considered previously impossible and then introduce Siri.

I agree whole heartedly with the conclusion of the article, that "the things that matter to engineers aren't the things that matter to real human beings."

I also noticed immediately at the end of the keynote that there wasn't an explicit mention of "corrected reception" in the new iPhone (there was mention of a new antennae design, but it wasn't explicit and not emphasised). I would have thought that this was an important reason, and perhaps why they opted for the new antennae design that they did - because of the poor reception issues with the "original" iPhone 4.

I don't fear for Apple — I fear for the entire industry. Tonight I got my new toy and of course I wasted a few hours exploring every inch of the iPhone 4s. But the more I did it, the more empty I found myself feeling. It hit me hard that I didn't give a damn about the thing and I was still upset about Jobs. It's the very notion that there will never be another "and just one more thing".

Walking home tonight I kept rattling over the many impersonal things he touched and made human. Even if Jobs had just done the Apple II that would would have been enough for one lifetime, yet he did it again and again. And I'm ten years younger than Jobs so my entire concept of technology was shaped by him and now I'm feeling like an orphan. And while he's not eloquent that's what our friend Woz is really saying...

I would take that even a step further... The entire consumerist culture is under threat (at least in this hemisphere). Think of how excited you are when you get any new toy (car, brand new jacket, tv, shoes..) and all the euphoria and emotional investment involved in the point and time of purchase. Then you take it home, play with it for a little while and while you realize that this "thing" doesn't completely and fully satisfy you, the excitement fizzles out over time and you go looking for the next high. Apple is like the Vatican of consumerism so they are able to sustain this emotional euphoria in their customers for much much longer than most brands.

I say good riddance.. The time we spend obsessing over a phone, computer, car, right type of clothing would be much better spent meeting and connecting with new people, solving problems, reflecting on life and teaching younger people.

I'm starting to sound like a Yogi on an acid trip so I'll end there.

+1 you as it is true, yet only half of it. This consumerist culture fueled technology development so it become possible for the millions of people also to get excited by, for example, seeing Hubble photos and discussing the screwdup of CERN/Gran Sasso scientists across the world - the details of SR and GR application in this case became normal topic of discussion in wide audiences.

>Apple is like the Vatican of consumerism so they are able to sustain this emotional euphoria in their customers for much much longer than most brands.

the rest of industry is following them thus driving technology development, wide accessibility and price decrease. It isn't Apple who is to be blamed that human race can move forward only through consumption economy. (Btw, before you object (if) - i come from the country that made huge attempt to move forward bypassing the consumerism and we all know the results of the experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union . "mladenkovacevic" - if you aren't too young, it sounds like you may be familiar first hand with how it looks like when country tries to bypass the consumerism driver)

hello Comrade lol. Yes I am indeed just old enough to remember the old ways. Although, perhaps ours wasn't so much a failed experiment as the Soviet one was.

Up until the 1980s when the western countries imposed strict trading restrictions with Yugoslavia (despite our friendly stance towards both the West and the East) my country was an economic power in the region. Wikipedia informs me that our annual GDP growth averaged 6.1 percent, health care was free, literacy was 91 percent, and life expectancy was 72 years.

We were simply broken as a casualty of the US effort to overthrow various communist governments in Eastern Europe. It was by no means an organic/natural effect of our socialism being dysfunctional.

>It was by no means an organic/natural effect of our socialism being dysfunctional.

as in some humor underground song of 70's (written by a musician who traveled internationally with official Soviet Union folk choir) "you can find everything in Yugoslavia - condoms, TVs, clothes, watches - everything, except f&cking socialism " :)

Apple's best move would probably be to immediately bring back Woz in a more hands-on role.

Unless that role were an engineering role, I don't think he'd be interested.

Interview suggests that he's equally capable on marketing too.

I'm sure he's quite capable, since he is a generally smart dude, but just the same, everything I've ever read makes me think he only likes building things.

Somewhat off-topic, but in order for Woz to get an iPhone he has to stand in line at an Apple store? Am I understanding that right...or is it just for publicity sake? I would've thought he would have enough connections inside to get a phone long before launch day and certainly not through a retail store.

As he said himself, he can get an iPhone mailed to his house if he wants one. He said he just likes the experience of waiting in line.

a previous (very interesting) interview on techcrunch explains why he's standing in while: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/14/steve-wozniak-on-how-the-ip... it's about the "experience"

Woz has stated in the past that he is entitled to free Apple products for the rest of his life, but he never takes Apple up on it.

This is what scares me. Apple is going to become a "good enough" company. The fact is that no one at Apple is going to have both the vision to see what matters, and the clout within the company to actually affect change. As Woz said, the product line for the near future will be fine, but the true test will come when they have to come up with what's next.

Apple will be fine for the next decade. There are a few areas where Apple can enter where disruption is easy and desperately needed such as vehicle entertainment systems and televisions.

As for what's next, I think it's wearable computing. It's still a long way off but it has clearly entered their thoughts with the iPod nano and patents that have surfaced over the past few years.

the person asking the questions wasn't a reporter. just a member of the public asking him some questions. cut her some slack!

How come Pixar was still able to make great movies after Steve left?

In case that wasn't 100% irony: He mostly funded them, took part in decisions at first, but stopped soon after that... Pixar is not is child.

Seen Cars? Up?

Really? You're pointing to Up as a Pixar failure?

Cars and UP were far from failures.

Cars 2 was a Pixar failure, though.

I respect your decision to not have kids, but in this case that is clouding your judgement.

Liked Cars at least better than Monsters Inc. Cars 2, meh. I keep going to see these under the guise that I'm seeing what Pixar technology is capable of, but I think it's at least as much that I like the films.

Personally I use the best products available to me at any given time. Today they are Apples products, but I'm well aware that tomorrow they may not be. And this could have been the case irrespective of Jobs passing. Graham Bell died. Edison died. But innovation never died. As Tim OReilly said, there will continue to be revolutions, and revolutionaries.

Anyone else find it odd that Steve Wozniak has to stand in line to get the latest device from Apple? Is it just that he enjoys the meet & greet, or is he not enough of a living legend for Apple to ship him a complimentary one for free?

He does it because he doesn't like the preferential treatment. He loves the whole atmosphere of waiting in line and being a part of the buzz. I think he values fair more than anything; he gave away a sizable part of his money to the early employees because it wasn't fair for him to have so much while they worked hard and got so little.

Ya, I read about that and I really, really, really respect him for that.

kaffeinecoma - Google "The Woz Plan" for more.

Yeah that was very impressive too but I was actually more impressed with was the fact that he gave the first 5 employees a million dollars worth of his stock.

see the second to last question in the founders at work article:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Just read through the whole interview. Wow. Had no idea he did all that. That is just amazing.

Video doesn't work for me :(

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