I don’t know if he drinks but I would like to have a beer with Steve Wozniak. I have to assume based on his girth that he’s not afraid of a beer or two. Be it his willingness to appear on The Big Bang Theory, or more recently to disparage Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s early products while speaking candidly about his desire to own a Tesla Model S minutes after speaking at a Forward with Ford conference. A delicious irony is that “Woz” presumably wouldn’t be afraid to ask for a double helping. Funny, how co-founding Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) makes obesity somehow acceptable.
Wozniak Loved the Early Newtons
To Wozniak’s candid nature, in the aforementioned interview with The Verge, he had no trouble stating that early Macs were rubbish saying Steve Jobs “made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product.”
During the interview, however, he shifted gears to the progress Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) made with the Newton.
You know, I loved the Newton. That thing changed my life. John Sculley got demeaned by Steve a lot, but he did the Knowledge Navigator, the Newton, HyperCard — unbelievable things. The first day I had the Newton, I hand-wrote a message… I got a phone call in the San Francisco airport on the way to Disneyworld with my kids. And I hand-wrote a message to myself on a notepad paper: Sarah — that’s my daughter — dentist, Tuesday, 2PM. And I saw a button called “Assist,” and I thought, this must be a menu. And I tapped the Assist button — it opened up the calendar, Tuesday at 2PM, it put in the word “dentist” and it grabbed Sarah out of my contact list. And that was the first time in my life I had seen a computer understand… I had written something for a human, and the computer understood it.
C’mon, Mrs. Woz!
Finally (though this was addressed earlier in the interview) the “Woz” dropped one last hint for his wife. It’s pretty clear the man wants a Tesla Model S, you got that Mrs. Woz?
Now, she might surprise me and get me a Model S for my birthday in August, we’ll see. She knows… Every day, I sent her articles about the Model S consistently. I have for a couple of years. That’s why one day she said, “Hey, we should go down and look at one,” and decided, okay, we’ll buy it, but we backed out. Elon Musk wrote me, he sent me some emails, he was pissed that I was getting a gas guzzler and that I wasn’t a Silicon Valley boy. But you know, there are some times that you have to make tradeoffs. Because my wife’s from Kansas, I’m no longer just buying anything I feel like at any time.
There is something nice about reading about a billionaire not just spending crazy, but hey man, you deserve it.