Steve Wozniak Quotations | Page 2

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.

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.

Atari is a very sad story.

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.

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.

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

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."

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

He [Steve Jobs] had more of the future vision: We can bring this to everyone; we can start a company; we can sell it.

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.

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.

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 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?

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

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.

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.

Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.

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,

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

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.

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

Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that ... But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines ... well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice.

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.

Rockets are bad technology. iPhones are good technology

I believe you should have a world where you’ve got to license something at a fair price. There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don’t know if Samsung would stop us.

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

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

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...

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

I had much more money than you ever need in your life to live on. So I was giving computer labs to school districts. I was - but then I decided you should really give yourself.

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)

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.

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

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.

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

I wanted to be a fifth grade teacher because my teacher was so important to me and was giving me the education that was going to take me through life and through this world.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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,

Imagination is something you do alone.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.