Highest Rated Comments


TheSteveWozniak7726 karma

All through my time with personal computers from the start, I developed an attitude that things like movement towards newer, better technologies - like the Macintosh computer, like the touchscreen of the iPhone - that these were making the human more important than the technology. We did not have to modify our ways of living. So the human became very important to me. And how do you represent what humanity is?

You know what, I have things in my head, some very special people in my life that I don't talk about, that mean so much to me from the past. Those little things that I keep in my head are my little secrets. It's a part of my important world, my whole essence of my being. I also believe in honesty. If you tell somebody, "I am not snooping on you," or, "I am giving you some level of privacy; I will not look in your drawers," then you should keep your word and be honest. And I always try to avoid being a snoop myself, and it's rare in time that we can look back and say, "How should humans be treated?" Not, "How can the police run everything?"

I was brought up in a time when communist Russia under Stalin was thought to be, everybody is spied on, everybody is looked into, every little thing can get you secretly thrown into prison. And, no. We had our Bill of Rights. And it's just dear to me. The Bill of Rights says some bad people won't do certain bad things because we're protecting humans to live as humans.

So, I come from the side of personal liberties. But there are also other problems. Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses. I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside. These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.

TheSteveWozniak6293 karma

Tim Cook is acknowledging the employees of Apple and the customers of Apple as real people. He is continuing a strong tradition that Steve Jobs was known for of making good products that help people do things they want to do in their life, and not taking the company into roads of, "Oh, we'll make all our money like by knowing you and advertising to you.” We'll make good products. And you know, I started out as a hardware product guy, so I'm glad to see that.

I worry a little bit about - I mean I love my Apple Watch, but - it's taken us into a jewelry market where you're going to buy a watch between $500 or $1100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1100. The band's the only difference? Well this isn't the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot. So it might be moving, but you've got to follow, you know. You've got to follow the paths of where the markets are.

Everything else, I'm very approving of Tim Cook, because every time we have a new iOS update, I'm very happy that it's doing things that really affect people. Like transferring calls from my phone to my computer, etc. I really love even the Airplay, and all that. So, I love the software, and I love the hardware, and nothing's letting me down. So I approve very strongly of Tim Cook and the new Apple. I dearly miss Steve Jobs too, but, that's all.

TheSteveWozniak5986 karma

I have that feeling all the time because I like a nice, quiet, simple life. I grew up shy. I'm more into products than I'm into socializing. And I do not carry around my phone answering every text message instantly. I am not one of those people.

I wait until I'm alone in my places and get on my computer and do things where I think I'm more efficient. I really see a lot of people that are dragged into it, but you know, I don't criticize them. When you have change, it's not that the change in how people are behaving different to you is bad or good, it’s just different.

So that's sort of the modern way, and you know the millennials, every generation wants to criticize the next generation for missing out on things like personal human contact, but I'll tell you a little story. When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you'd have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!

TheSteveWozniak4759 karma

u/andymbrit, I get asked that everywhere. I have pulled so many hundreds of pranks; I pull pranks almost every day! So I can't come up with one funniest prank. Sometimes I like to talk about early ones; when I was so young, how could I have thought of it.

I did like the one where I put a little ticking electronic metronome in a school locker, back when very few people could build such things as a ticking metronome; and I had it rigged so that when you opened the locker, a little tinfoil switch caused the ticking to speed up.

TheSteveWozniak3770 karma

That question might be too hard for any human being.

Greatest invention... I just described one, which was a device to pop anywhere - real tiny, into a glove compartment, a backpack, whatever - and be able to locate it, wherever it is in the world. There are some devices that kind of claim that now, but they don't really work sufficiently.

A device that gives us one extra hour per day?