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Comment by testfrequency | Hacker News Reader

I love seeing all the positive comments here on HN regarding Woz.

I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.

I personally always found that to be so far from the truth, and the root of it really was how much Apple people didn’t like him speaking open and freely about the company (failures, success, and everything between).

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You're either talking about people who worked with him at least forty years ago and had a problem with him, or people who are talking out of their ass. No doubt about which this is, but I wonder why.

You must have worked in a very odd and isolated department. I never heard that rhetoric, even once, throughout my tenure. Nor have any of my old colleagues who still work there and are quite well known internally (notorious patents, features / tentpole DRI, etc).

From your post history, you left Apple in 2018, so I doubt you have up to date knowledge.

Correct. You’re also assuming I have no friends…

I was there 2010-2015 and I corroborate. The ambitions PM types were always quite critical of Woz, because they were all in on the Koolaid and he is not.

Woz bought 2 Model 3s thinking he would be able to rent them out as robotaxis. I'm sure he's a nice guy but I have no idea why he's (still) held up as some kind of tech guru.

He's in the arena trying things

Or maybe he knows that he sometimes has weird ideas, but pursues them anyway, because it's kind of neat.

Many of us grew up in the PLD era, k-maps, etc. Woz pushed early HW to the limit, with SW APIs that delivered real value. Woz made astute design trade-offs based on full stack knowledge that his peers lacked. The world’s moved on to the GPU (low precision, accelerated parallel compute?) era, but the Woz view point still holds. You can see it in the AI kernel optimizations, or rematerialization methods to push GPU HW to the new limits, and trade-offs need to be made. GPU HW for 4-bit QAT or even 2-bit will dramatically affect the SW (AI) of this era. What trade-offs do you make?

I saw Woz on Northbound 280 “driving” his cherry red Model S, using FSD. He was looking down at the screen the whole time I watched him. Swear he had ssh’d into it.

Why would they promote that narrative? Was Woz critical of the company after he left?

> I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.

Are you sure they werent talking about the other Steve? Are there any stories or examples from your co-workers? I've also only ever heard good things about him as a human and engineer.

Nobody calls Woz “Steve”, he’s almost always referred to as Woz.

And no one says Woz is not to be trusted or insane... so I was just curious about the stories you heard. Where as people have said insane and untrustworthy about Jobs.

I’m not sharing those stories for sake of privacy.

Also, I actually never heard any stories like that about Steve. Steve was more or less: don’t talk to him, don’t make eye contact with him, don’t take the same elevator as him.

Obviously, the public had their opinions and stories of Steve..but generally, I never experienced much commentary on Steve. Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.

> Woz, meanwhile, always felt like a punching bag for Apple employees on the off chance his name came up in conversation.

A little more context would make this interesting. Were people complaining about the legacy of his work for Apple which ended in the eighties, or something more contemporary about Woz's public life?

Sounds like I worked in Infinite Loop at a similar time to you.

Everything you say above about Steve is identical to what I was told to do regarding “SJ”.

That's wild to talk about a guy like that who hasn't been actively working on product for a long long time.

> I’m not sharing those stories for sake of privacy.

This makes it tough to believe. But I get it.

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