Steve Wozniak Says: Apple Software Is “Crappy.”

If Apple is the creator of the ‘personal computer’ as we know it, company co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the fathers. In a recent interview Wozniak says Apple, among others “tend to turn out the crappiest products.” Wait there’s more.

Wozniak: “I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.”

OK, that doesn’t sound promising. How about an example? “I couldn’t give you an example. It happens just all the time. Over and over and over.”

John Stafford of ‘The Cardinal Inquirer’ (a publication of the Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism) interviewed Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak earlier in December. As you may suspect, the Woz was very frank about Apple’s efforts today.

Apparently 20 years after leaving Apple, the Woz doesn’t have much good to say about Apple’s software efforts (or Microsoft, or AOL, or…).

For example, if the Woz could redesign one thing, either today or along the way, as Stafford put it, what would that be?

“I would try to take us back to the early Macintosh, the failed Lisa-type thinking of philosophies that the human is the center of the world and the computer gets designed around that person, with very good understanding of here is how people live their lives. There’s a set of rules that we are going to enforce and follow for our software. Everything is going to be very consistent, very simple, and very obvious to that human. I wish we could go back to that, because we had it and we lost it.”

In other words, I’m not a part of the present and won’t be a part of the future, so let’s go back to the past as I see it ‘cause I’m more comfortable there.

Apple’s Mac OS X generally gets kudos from media folks well beyond the Mac’s market share. Secure. Dependable. Stable. Unix. Plentiful applications. Is there a problem with OS X, Steve?

“I don’t even call it a problem; it’s just something you learn to work around. It’s like, there was such a cleaner, good approach to it and they did this stupid thing. But remember, the people who wrote the OS X weren’t the people who developed the Lisa and Macintosh. Those guys are gone.”

John Stafford is writing for Stanford University’s school of journalism. One technique that is surely taught future journalists is the ‘follow up question’ and John does not disappoint.

Is it difficult having started this phenomenon of a company andy maybe not agreeing with some of its decisions?”

You can see where John is going with this line of questioning? He’s asking if Woz’s perspective on things today, being somewhat negative, could be tainted by emotion from the past and simply not agreeing with Apple’s current product directions.

What’s Steve have to say to that?

“Oh no, I agree with it so much. There’s just a few areas that are my own values cause me to be a perfectionist, but I do not go criticizing Apple very much at all. I mean, no, I love every part of the Apple world. You can look with your eyes and just see that it always has - every version of Macintosh, including the PowerBooks - the most beautiful product quality and they generally tend to lead the others in terms of qualities you like—thinness, size of screen, pixels on the screen. The whole world of Apple works together.”

Uh, that’s nice, but doesn’t really answer the question, and appears to contradict answers to other questions. You know, the one about Apple products being ‘crappy’ and all.

The Stanford Cardinal reader base is probably made up in large part by students (duh, Bambi) who also devote much time to music; iTunes, iTunes Music Store, and the iPod.

What does the Woz think of record companies, artists, and digital rights management?

“DRM, of course, bothered me back when, you know. I also know so many people that either developed or spent a lot of time creating music and have almost no money. They could only live on what the music brings them in terms of money, and to see somebody ripping them off is about the worst thing that can happen in the world.”

Suffice it to say that Steve Wozniak doesn’t think much of the recording industry and their efforts to enforce DRM.

“Now, the laws have ruled that because we’re human, anything that we can experience with our senses, like music or videos, even smells I guess, we have a right to memorialize and keep personal scrapbooks, copies for ourselves. If it came on the radio, you have the right to record it. If it came on the TV, you have the right to record it, but only for your personal use. And that’s where I see DRM sometimes getting in the way of that.”

Why digital rights management? Why is it here? Steve has an opinion.

“Now, the laws have ruled that because we’re human, anything that we can experience with our senses, like music or videos, even smells I guess, we have a right to memorialize and keep personal scrapbooks, copies for ourselves. If it came on the radio, you have the right to record it. If it came on the TV, you have the right to record it, but only for your personal use. And that’s where I see DRM sometimes getting in the way of that.”

Of course, this isn’t just a case of selfishness on the part of the recording industry. There are people in the world who steal music and don’t mind doing so. Someone has to pay for that, right, Steve?

“Unfortunately, the number of people that don’t keep their agreements are the ones that are spoiling it for the rest of us and enforcing that there will have to be things like DRM to make sure that people who work as hard as artists get paid.”

Is Apple a hardware company or a software company? Will OS X show up on non-Apple Intel boxes in the future?

No, I don’t. Apple has been very adamant and has stuck by their guns for a long, long time and they put everything at risk in the company many times to basically say that we’re going to be a proprietary operating system and you’re going to have to buy our hardware to run it. Apple has treated itself more like a hardware company than a software company, even though it really is the Macintosh operating system that makes it different.”

Unfortunately, Steve doesn’t provide examples of Apple’s crappy products, though his views on Apple as a company, and digital rights management appear positive and in line with other media pundits.

Click Here for the full interview.

Carol Mary Miller
Who is Steve Wozniak and what’s he done lately?

Jack D. Miller
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. It’s ever so easy to criticize what others are doing, great or not. It’s more difficult to do better. He did better in his day but that day is over.

Alexis Kayhill
I have to appreciate anyone being honest and telling us what they think and giving us perspective from days gone by. I suppose when you stop being productive, the last thing you do is build a soap box.