Happy 50th Birthday, Apple! Exclusive Interview with co-founder Steve Wozniak at the Reagan Library

Amazing to go 50 years for anything. There have been times, you know, when Apple was having severe troubles, maybe they'd go out of business. There were a couple of major ones of those. And to reach the size we are, it's brand. You know, we just have brand. And brand is largely what do people expect? Do they trust you? Things like that. And we've always made great products. That's one thing. We'd never go back and just make a schlock product. They always had to work well and be good, and that kept the brand going. Brand is worth more than... The technology is about the same in all products these days. So, you know, what do people think of you? And we've set a lot of goals to be good to the users, not just ourselves the producer, but taking user needs into account, things like privacy and all.

The Apple IIc was my favorite of them all.

Well, I knew it by then, by that point in time. But I was like I was following all the new advances, this and that. And I was so busy in my head even compared to getting this fantastic medal and this fantastic honor. But it was a great event for me. The event itself, I mean, you kind of go up and you get a medal, okay. When you've never been in those kind of big medal situations, it's like oh, this is just how it goes. You don't really admire it as much as a lot of people on the outside, but eventually I was on the committee to select the recipients of that award for future years. And that was a great privilege, too.

When I was working and creating these things, I could see about a year ahead because I was working on it, but 2 years ahead I'd make a guess and it'd be wrong. Things you didn't expect would come from others on the outside. So, it's very hard to predict ahead. I'm not a futurist. I'm a feet-on-the-ground engineer. So, predicting 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, well, the best guess I can make for 50 years is products are going to be similar to today, handheld smart devices are going to be the key technology in our lives. And I think why do I think that would last 100 years? Well, look at cars. They haven't really changed a lot in their form and function and use in over 100 years. Once you hit a plateau that's sort of right for a lot of purposes, it's even harder to turn back and go in some very strange new different direction. I don't really trust very much of these ones oh, we're going to get into the brain and have sensors and you just think thoughts and you won't even have a machine. I don't like to go that way because of all the slow experiences of trying these things, getting your brain waves to move balls on a screen and all that. Just too slow. You want things that are useful.

I look back more... This is a case where I do look back on the past. I remember exactly what was going through my head to come up with very clever, clever design tricks that couldn't be in any book even. And my own abilities and I wanted to be recognized by engineers more than starting a company or an industry. I wanted engineers to look at my designs and say, 'Whoa, he thought of things differently.' And I got that respect. But it's amazing to go 50 years. When we started, you know, I read stories about oh, only 2% of companies make it. Well, keeping the same name for that long. Look back, oh my gosh, how could you ever keep going with really same name, same company for... That's a huge long time. 2 years can be a long time in this business.

Yeah. Of all the periods of Steve Jobs, the 5 years before Apple, I call it Steve Jobs zero, just loved him so much and he's definitely been the greatest influence even on my own life, you know, in what he did. He pursued... He wanted to make a business and make things and new things and keep going. I wanted to be very clever at making things at a certain point in time and I trained myself to do that. So, I miss Steve Jobs. I wish he were here. I wish he were here. I think we'd have a better world even if we can't vision what it would be exactly.