Steve wozniak quotes

I want to feel that I own things.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you've heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.

I really worry about everything going to the cloud.

I never sensed really bad blood between Microsoft and Apple. A lot of Macintosh users feel badly about PCs and do have some bad feelings. I call them Macintosh bigots a little. They say, oh, no, only the Macintosh is the good one, and I don't like to be that way.

Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.

It's a lot easier to think of an app and write it than it is to convince people to want it.

For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.

I really believe I know why my designs were better than any other human being, but I don't want to take credit for starting Apple, for turning the world around or anything like that.

I just believe in whatever you're going to do, even if it's work, have a little bit of fun attitude about it. You can be happy.

I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

I was kind of amazed because I first found out about blue boxes in an article in Esquire magazine labeled fiction. That article was the most truthful article I've ever read in my life... That article was so truthful, and it told about a mistake in the phone company that let you dial phone calls anywhere in the world. What an amazing thing to discover.

I went and I started teaching computers to young kids, to fifth graders at first, later to sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth graders. I also started teaching teachers. And that was back in the days when we'd wire up the labs ourselves and crimp on the Ethernet connectors and then we would.

My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.

Steve Jobs didn't really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don't deny that.

The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.

College just didn't even have computers for an under-curriculum when I started college.

He [Steve Jobs] had come from the surplus electronics parts world.So he came from that world, and he said let's sell PC boards for $40. We'll build them for $20 and sell them for $40.

Steve Jobs doesn't use a Mac, and won't, because it's too crappy in his opinion.

All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.

The easier it is to do something, the harder it is to change the way you do it.

I saw lots of music devices. I loved playing with music devices. And like most of the world, I thought of a music device as a music device. Steve Jobs tends to look beyond that, and he doesn't see a music device as having any importance at all - how fast it is, how many songs it can hold, and all that - he sees music itself to a person as a being the important thing.

I wish to God that Apple and Google were partners in the future.

My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.

Steve Jobs had very strong feelings about what makes a company great, what makes products great. He more or less chose Tim Cook to be in that role, in that position.

A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

I went - I had designed - in high school designed hundreds and hundreds of computers over and over and over, so I developed these skills without ever thinking I'd do it in life as job.

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.

I never got into Linux. I swear to God, it's only lack of time. I'm past the years of my life where I can really dig into something like running a Linux system. I'm very sympathetic to the whole idea; Linux people always think the way I want to think.

I've never really been associated with the hackers very much. I am sympathetic to them. I understand how their mind works. It's like a child that is born and wants to explore every little - open up every little drawer there is and find out how the world works.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

I hate to say it, and Apple never likes it, but I love anything that's hacker oriented. I don't like passing it onto others, or getting things for free. I don't like stealing music one bit, at all.

Well, I have many models of Prius that got recalled, but I have a new model that didn't get recalled. This new model has an accelerator that goes wild, but only under certain conditions of cruise control. And I can repeat it over and over and over again--safely.

To give of yourself is much more important than giving a gift you can buy.

If you try to make such projects, unseen by others, as perfect as any human could, you'll develop skills that other professionals don't have.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

I wanted to be funny. And I'm always acknowledged for my pranks and jokes nowadays.

Being an electronic genius was a reputation I had, maybe being even into math and science almost exclusively and not wanting to be in the other normal parts of the world.

I learned not to worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.

Somebody who's designing something for himself has at least got a market of one that he's very close to.

I went drinking with Gray Powell and all I got was a lousy iPhone prototype.

Everything that has a computer in will fail. Everything in your life, from a watch to a car to a radio, to an iPhone, it will fail if it have a computer in it.

I have always respected education, which is why I actually went back secretly and taught school for eight years.

Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.

You should stay closely connected to the technology when you start your company.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.

When you're about 20 years old, you kind of think out - I figured out that it was better - less good to be successful and better to have a laughing life, laugh more than you frown all through your life. Because on the day you die, which one would you have said had the happier life, the better life? And so I put a lot of humor in my life.

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

Did you really invent the computer, or am I being pranked right now?

All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control,' he said. 'We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God.

The Homebrew Computer Club was the highlight of my life. I was too shy to ever talk in the club meeting, but the way that I could communicate sometimes was by doing good designs. I was very skilled at a certain type of circuit design.

Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.

I have never left the company. I keep a tiny residual salary to this day because that's where my loyalty should be forever. I want to be an "employee" on the company data base. I won't engineer, I'd rather be basically retired, due to my family. (talking about his relationship with Apple Inc)

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!

The way I did it, every job was A+.

In the end, I hope there's a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.

Every dream I've ever had in life has come true ten times over.

I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.

I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.

Rockets are bad technology. iPhones are good technology

I absolutely do not need a salary or a job, that's the last thing I need.

You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that's one of the biggest honors of my life.

I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.

You'd better have the technology knowledge. I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you'll end up owning so few of those ideas.

I started passing out the schematics and the code listings for the computer, telling everyone here it is. It's small, it's simple, it's inexpensive: Build your own. No idea to start a company. Steve Jobs came by later and say, you know, people are interested. Why don't we start a company?

Not everything in life can go perfectly according to plan. I mean I didn't keep every girlfriend I ever had.

I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly

With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away.

Predictions can sound really good if you're good with words and can express them eloquently and give people ideas and inspiration in their head. But I'm not really good at that, so I don't want to.

Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.

I had no money. I had no savings account.So I would bring down my color TV set, a Sears TV with a cable snaked into it - they had no video-in back in those days - and hooked it up to the circuit of very few chips and then a little keyboard you could type on. And I was trying to impress people with how did he do it with fewer chips than anyone could ever imagine?

My primary phone is the iPhone. I love the beauty of it. But I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do.

It's just not right that so many things don't work when they should. I don't think that will change for a long time.

Young children were always so important to me. Adults should treat children with more respect. We should put more monies in our schools. I grew up on that side of the coin.

Geek it's really more a characteristic where you don't socialize. You don't talk the normal languages.

The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn't have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.

The people I recommend the iPhone 4S for are the ones who are already in the Mac world, because it's so compatible, and people who are just scared of computers altogether and don't want to use them. The iPhone is the least frightening thing. For that kind of person who is scared of complexity, well, here's a phone that is simple to use and does what you need it to do.

I am the person I want to be. I got to teach and had some of the greatest times in my life learning that I had some teaching skills and doing some incredible things teaching 200 hours of computers a year to fifth graders, making them experts at certain things.

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

Pretty much I want to be Steve Wozniak, who I decided I was at a young age and not change. I want to go back to school and get my college degree like I would have without Apple. I want to teach young kids like I would have without Apple. And part of it is I'm accessible. I'm open. And so many people e-mail me and get me. And as much as I can I try to answer people, listen to them, be polite and say yes.

When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer.

I don't believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee... I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.

All through time in Apple products, even from our very first ones, that's how he [Steve Jobs] looked at the world, that you don't really want a piece of technology, a certain type of chip. What you want is a solution to a problem in life, some cause, some issue that you want in your life that'll help you. And it's how do you make that almost one step - say it and it happens.

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.

It's funny how when you're up so late at night for so long your mind can get into these creative places, the kind of creative places that come to you when you're halfway between asleep and awake.

When you're providing a service to somebody, you're the guy they always call when something's wrong.

And Communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them.

We truly could have used the later Jobs in earlier years at Apple, is what I feel.

Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way

The biggest benefit in my life comes from my Segway, which I use everywhere I am. If I'm going to San Antonio, for example, I'll load it in the car and just go everywhere with it.

Imagination is something you do alone.

Back in high school I told my dad, "I'm going to have a computer someday." And he said that it cost as much as a house-the downpayment on a house. And I said, "Well, I'll live in an apartment."

Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.

A lot of things seem to be worth almost no money. but if you do them very well, and they help people fill a need, there's a great business you can build around that.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

I don't think I was talking specifically about Steve Jobs. It was just a general philosophy about one person grows up and he's kind of managing companies and every day he's working making sure this is in place and that's in place.

I'm also a fan with sticking with the most standard software that millions of other users also use, because you get the benefit of all those other users' problems and solutions.

What Steve Jobs and I did-and at the same time Bill Gates and Paul Allen did-we had no savings accounts, no friends that could loan us money. But we had ideas, and I wanted all my life to be a part of a revolution.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

I just was non-political and didn't see myself as a person who could push people around, make their decision, you know, and tell them how lousy their work was.

If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach.

But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

I wanted to be an elementary school teacher my whole life.

I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.

Atari is a very sad story.

If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny

You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.

When you stop and think about it, a smartphone is basically a whistle you can carry.

I do not like to talk about the future. I don't like to be one of those people. It's so easy to have a very vague idea and say, oh, computers will be 3D-ish and then 10 years later I'll say I predicted it 10 years ahead. I don't think that's honest and I don't think that's valid and worth anything.

I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things.

It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips? I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain... Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.

If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family.

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

Don't worry that you can't seem to come up with sure billion dollar winners at first. Just do projects for yourself for fun. You'll get better and better.

Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you're doing because you believe it's right.

I think that the anti-Microsoft sentiment is simply due to their having been so successful selling a lot of crap.

The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn't thought of before and that aren't talked about in the news all the time.

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further.

Neither one of us could be sure we'd get our money back on this investment, but we just wanted to have company of our own for once because we were best friends.

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

I was born to teach. I have always had this gift with children.

There's nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.