Steve Wozniak was always a little bit of a rebel, I guess that is why, at first, Apple worked just fine with him and Steve Jobs, and also explains why they eventually could no longer work together. Woz was a great engineer and Jobs was the great salesman, and often times the two extreme mindsets just do not get along. Woz took his money and ran, but not far away, as he is still an “Apple” employee, making very little money as a promoter and speaker.
At the Apps World North America conference in San Francisco, Woz gave WIRED a wide-ranging interview on multiple topics – However, his most interesting comment had to be his recommendation that Apple also make and Android smartphone along with their own iPhone…sort of an iAndroid. Woz said:
“There’s nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market. We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time.”
Although Apple is unlikely to take Woz seriously, it could be a great move on Apple’s part – they could have the best of both worlds – keeping their precious iPhone users happy, and at the same time recruit Android users that love the flexibility of Android, but also love the design of the iPhone. Now that would be a move that would piss Samsung off to no end…almost guaranteeing that Apple would remain number one in the U.S., by a large margin.
In some past interviews, Woz has been critical of Apple’s ability to innovation and the “staleness” of iOS, but in this interview, he seemed to defend his beloved Apple by saying that:
“The great products really come from secret development. You put small teams of great people on them and they aren’t bothered by other people commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it. A whole new category of products doesn’t happen very often. It might happen once a decade. Sometimes you have to wait for one of those to come about.”
Again, in stark contradiction to early interviews, he praises Apple for having the courage to say, “no,” when it comes to including new features on the iPhone – “If you have something really good, don’t change it; don’t screw it up,” arguing that adding features is not the same as innovation. He also believes that people do not choose their smartphone based on features, and the takes a quick jab at Samsung’s countless features, discounting them as merely “feature creep.”
So there we have the thoughts of Steve Wozniak on Apple, Android, Samsung, and how he believes Apple should produce an iAndroid smartphone, but keep the same iPhone “precious looks” that he perceives Apple still retains; quite a 180 from other comments we have heard – maybe the old Woz was frequenting the old “watering hole” before this interview?
Please let us know on our Google+ Page if an Android OS on an iPhone device would interest you – does it sound like something you would purchase?