Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joins 'The Claman Countdown' to reflect on Apple’s 50th anniversary, weigh in on the rise of AI and warn about the growing power of Big Tech.
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11:53Before we go, I know we got to go really quickly, but as you look at this 50th anniversary coming up, if you could make one tiny course correction at all in anything that you did in Apple, what would it be?
From floppy discs to FaceTime, Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The tech giant kicked off the celebrations March 13th with a special performance from 17-time Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys at New York City's Grand Central Station. Apple taking the festivities worldwide with all kinds of events in China, Thailand, South Korea, and it'll make its way back to Apple Park in Cupertino, California next week for the company's official anniversary on April 1st. But it all began back in 1976 with these two guys. Steve Jobs was the marketing genius behind propelling Apple computer to its now $3.7 trillion valuation. Meanwhile, Steve Wozniak was the engineering brain behind it all, inventing the company's first computers, the Apple 1 and the big hit Apple 2.
I don't have time. Time just tells us that it always moves forward. It only moves in one direction. And no, I couldn't tell you if it was 30. I don't do years. I don't do years. I mean, even it's our anniversary today and I don't know how many years. I just count days. I just count days. 6,436 days today.
Okay. Wow. You had that on the tip of your tongue. You know, we go back to the Apple 1 personal computer. First released what? April 11th in '76. It lacked a case.
Got it. This thing lacked a case, lacked a power supply, no keyboard, no display. These were all things that had to be provided by the users. What was it like? Take us back to the moment you were building that computer. What was it like when you pressed the on button and it actually worked?
Well, I was influenced by a lot of people that believed that computers were going to change society. It was the Homebrew Computer Club and they were all trying to build computers by the standard method and I built one of my own design five years before that. I just wanted something to be more human that you could really use like a typewriter and you could type in programs and it was a useful computer at an affordable price and I had a different approach. So I would show it off. That's the only way I could communicate. I was too shy to actually go up and talk to people and I'd show off things I designed. And I didn't really intend to start a company or a business. I was a great computer designer. But I didn't want to get rich or anything. I just wanted other engineers to see some amazing things I was thinking up. And when I had this Apple 1 computer down at the Homebrew Computer Club, it wasn't designed by me as a computer. It was not a Wozniak computer. It was something I'd built before to get on the ARPANET, which is now the internet, but six far away computers across the country. And I could access them for free on the ARPANET. And I built a machine that could do that. And I transformed it into a computer by adding the brains, the microprocessor, and the right memory. And I wanted an affordable and people at the Homebrew Computer Club looking over my shoulder. Every single computer after I was showing this off that came out would have a keyboard and a video display. It became a change in how computers looked and felt, and it was much more human. So, I don't know. It was great. I just wanted other engineers to see it and respect my brilliance and I've gotten noted by the engineering community quite a bit now. I'm a fellow in the IEEE and I hope to someday get their Medal of Honor.
Oh, someday. I'm on the phone with them after the show. You need it. But when you turned it on and it actually worked when you created it, that's what I want to know. Was Steve Jobs there? Were you guys high-fiving each other? What was that moment like?
Well, at first I had this terminal could call far away computers and oh I got in my mind microprocessor is something I'd been designing all through high school these processors and wanted my own computer and told my dad I'd have one even if it cost as much as a house I'd have a computer and live in an apartment and so I built this thing up and I could actually I was down at Hewlett-Packard one night and I just wrote enough of a program had to be programmed into two chips to have 256 bytes of a program and I could actually type on the keyboard and it would pop in the display. And I just knew that this was what I wanted to show off to people that a computer and a display could be all-in-one to lower the cost.
Computers started off the size of entire rooms and then they started shrinking. They got smaller and smaller and now arguably we've got the smartphone in our hands which is a baby computer. What do you think the next iteration of the personal computer will look like? And is it even going to be something like a laptop?
I think it's going to be something similar to today handheld. And the reason I come up with that is cars, how much did they change in their perspective? Four wheels on the ground, a container that could fit certain number of people, and it could take you to the useful places you go. It didn't change much for 150 years. And so I don't think once you find a really good formula plateau things people want. Are we going to go to oh I just have to think thoughts and I don't have to do any work at all. I love my best device today actually is a wearable. It's a watch and I use my computer even more than my phone. So where's it going? I think it's still going to be very much like today. We've shown the value of that and I don't know define me a way that we can really do it. Oh, put a chip in the brain. The brain just has to think and things happen. I don't believe in that.
Well, obviously honesty. Honestly, because it's been the highest principle of my life. Don't say things that sound good. Say things that are real and you know them and that would be one advice to AI and another would be you know we can make a brain but trouble is it takes nine months.
16 more exchanges in this transcript
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Wozniak, S. (2026, March 24). INDUSTRY ALERT: Apple co-founder drops BLUNT warning on the future of AI [Interview transcript]. Fox Business. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/785578/
MLA
Steve Wozniak. "INDUSTRY ALERT: Apple co-founder drops BLUNT warning on the future of AI." Fox Business, 24 Mar. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/785578/.
BibTeX
@misc{wozniak2026_785578,
author = {Steve Wozniak},
title = {INDUSTRY ALERT: Apple co-founder drops BLUNT warning on the future of AI},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Fox Business. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/785578/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
