About Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, appeared at the A3F 2026 conference in Zurich for a fireside chat, where he reflected on the early days of Apple and his engineering philosophy. He described his design approach for the Apple II as "bottom up," focusing on the simplest, most parts-saving solution, and contrasted it with Steve Jobs' lack of hardware knowledge. Wozniak stated that he initially gave away his designs for free, describing himself as a "fan" of open-source and public-domain distribution, and said his motivation was to help others start a revolution. He also expressed skepticism about artificial intelligence, saying he does not believe it will replace human workers because humans must still verify outputs, and he criticized the use of AI in deepfakes and scams.
In a separate interview for the Floppy Days podcast, recorded as part of the Byte Shop 50th anniversary event, Wozniak discussed the Apple I and Apple II, noting that the Apple II was the only product that made money for Apple during its first ten years. He credited Byte Shop founder Paul Terrell with believing in the future of low-cost computers and arranging a $50,000 order for 100 Apple I computers. Wozniak also described entrepreneurship as "the most important thing in the world," arguing that it generates new industries and wealth rather than simply replacing old ones.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Steve Wozniak's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Unknown0:01
Developers and companies are being shared in ways that we might not want it to be.
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Steve Wozniak0:06
Yeah, I like that idea because I think of most companies just like Apple started out: young, idealistic, and you don't want to deceive your users. You want to protect them. But then again, I'm looking at all these companies going to the cloud, and the cloud you don't have any protections at all. OK, I agree. I've signed it all away. You don't own anything. Anything goes wrong on the cloud. The other day, good Lord, I picked up my phone, and I've always turned it on and listened to XM radio when I walked my dogs, and it just wouldn't log me in, wouldn't take my password or anything. I had to wait till after the weekend and call them and find out. I don't know, it was key to one of my six XM radios in a car, and the car got sold, and I lost all my online listing. How would I know? It's like you don't really have control over you can keep track and keep your own things still working. I don't like that part of dishonesty, which is in the companies that are on the cloud. It's really we don't have any strong regulation, strong principles. The user comes first. The user is the most important thing. Their data is their data and it's protected. We don't have these kind of regulation, if you will. Um, as far as you know, NSA, that's just that's more political thing, just violating the Constitution without a constitutional amendment, getting senators to write laws that just go against the Constitution and say we're obeying such-and-such a principle of number of a law. That's that's bad because it's a lie. To me, as a person, I grew up thinking my phone could be tapped. If I'm doing something wrong, the police can get a warrant and tap my phone, you know, and that was all reasonable. And now they're saying, well, anybody could be tapped. I don't know what the future is. Were we right in the past? Were we more right in the past? You know, we had a lot of laws to protect people for certain reasons, because if you get a prosecutor that can do anything, you get government agencies, you get police that can do anything, you become a police state. Their judge, jury, executioner, and can hide you away secretly. No, we're on a bad path in that direction, and we should have a lot of protections for law-abiding individuals.
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Unknown1:59
I think one of the reasons I wanted to ask about this is you know you spoke to the idea that people were walking around staring at their phones all the time. That coupled with like some of the NSA stuff, coupled with like all the things that say Facebook and Google uh may know about us now, and people seem to be finding technology a bit creepier. There seems to be a little bit of a backlash about that. Is that something that you kind of face?
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Steve Wozniak2:17
Well yeah, but we lost, we gave up our privacy, you know, a decade or more ago. I mean, we just started sharing our data. I used to, I grew up a very un non-privacy person, because I grew up actually when I was very young I said, you know what, if I tell my parents everything I'm doing, even if it's against the law or wrong, at least I won't do things that I think are really wrong. I'll have to justify them to myself and it will keep me a good person. So I'm totally no privacy. But I was one of the founders of the EFF, and you know we stand for everybody should have the privacy they think they do. If I have a conversation with my wife and I tell her my favorite color is red, I just want to know it's only between me and her and nobody else. Something like that makes us closer as people. And just finding out that everything you do, I mean where you are, your cell phone's being tracked, and your credit cards, and your cell phone camera can get turned on and they can have embarrassing pictures to blackmail you with. No, this is the new world. You know, you look at the old world and you say, look what we lost. We lost all these great good things. But somehow we always get to the new one and say, now this is the status quo, this is what's good. So I'm kind of afraid of that. We've got to put up a little bit of resistance and say, be honest with me. Tell me what you know, what you don't, how much you're watching me, how much you're not, and where do I have some privacy in my life? You know, I can't even send a letter. In the old days, you lick the letter shut and the sealed envelope meant nobody saw it, in theory. And now with email, you know, when we had the internet, it was beautiful. We escaped boundaries of the world, we escaped all the control, the controlling forces against us as little individuals. And now they're being used more to control us better than ever.
