Wozniak slams Apple for iPhone price drop snafu

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the driving force behind the original Apple I and Apple II computers, spoke about the iPhone price drop snafu, the innovative offerings coming from Google and other issues in a question and answer session after a keynote address at the ConnectWise Partner Summit in Tampa, Florida. Below are excerpts from the Q&A.

Do you have the iPhone? How did you get it?
Wozniak: I have the iPhone. I stayed up all night long to get it. I was the first in line in San Jose. I brought a bunch of my friends. I thought it was worth a party. I even played some stunts to be first in line. It was like waiting up all night in college for Rolling Stones tickets.

So what did you think of the iPhone?
Wozniak: I fell in love with the iPhone. I did not like it at first. But I don’t like to prejudge Apple products. The iPod I didn’t prejudge, it took me about a half day [to love it]. The iPhone took me about two weeks, maybe longer ... I fall in love with it every time I use it for browsing on the fly. I never thought I’d use it for email ... but sometimes it really saves me.

Is there any way Apple could have avoided the refund situation with the iPhone?
Wozniak: Nobody expects a product to drop that much in price in such a short time. Steve Jobs and everyone expect technology to drop in price. The first adopters always pay a premium. But that one was too soon, too harsh. It is not even complete. I have bought some iPhones that I am saving as gifts for people and I can’t get a refund on them. So why don’t you just take my receipt and give me the money back? Of course it always comes back in Apple store credit. So instead of getting $100 back you get $50 back in a sense. It is very optimal for the company. I don’t think Apple should have even done it. Maybe a much more gradual price reduction, $50 at first ...

What do you think will be the next revolution in platforms?
Wozniak: The iPhone I think signifies what most of those will be. Think about the iPhone being improved to where it can handle things on web pages like flash. But I like the human approach. Every smart phone I used before the iPhone, if I used it for web browsing ... was horrible to navigate. I think the iPhone has really got a lot of the right formulas: make the web page look the same, why didn’t anyone do that before?

The iPhone operates the way you think it should operate. Why didn’t anyone do that before?
Wozniak: The human gesturing just to scroll through lists or whatever is very comfortable and it feels good. As far as the browser, why didn’t anyone make it look like a real web page before? [I don’t know]. That was the biggest thing that really attracted me to the iPhone at first. Now I just love it! So I think it was a combination of factors that made it work.

How do you stay on top of what is the latest and greatest technology?
Wozniak: I pay attention to consumer gadgets. A lot of them are coming from Apple now so it’s very easy. I keep up by buying them. I go through almost every significant cell phone or smart phone that comes out to try to get my own opinion. I can’t judge it just based on what I read. Sometimes you have to really use it to see what works and what doesn’t, what is cumbersome for people and what is not.

Who do you consider the most innovative company out there right now when you look at the range of companies?
Wozniak: You are comparing Apples and Oranges but the two I would say are Apple and Google. I would say Apple is still number one based
on the fact that they are taking themselves into such new businesses so well. The thinking over at Google is very much like early Apple days. The fact that they give ample time off to work on their own ideas exactly matches some of the things that made Apple great.

What don’t you like about Apple when you look at it now?
Wozniak: I don’t like that a lot of the dreams of our early Macintosh era, they really came from the Lisa group that kicked Steve Jobs out more. A lot of those dreams of the computer being so humanised, making a person feel like a real human being, feel important, feel empowered – a lot of those get dissolved. You know it is more important to have the application than to have it nice and usable and sometimes now like in [Apple’s] Garage Band [application] it will be the dinkiest little icon at the bottom of the page [that] brings up the important choices you need to make right now. You can’t even find it. A lot of this intuitiveness really went away.

Where do you see the next big technology breakthroughs?
Wozniak: I am hoping that we get involved in a lot of artificial intelligence research, something that really mimics the brain or even neural networks ... learning jobs the way a human learns. As far as hardware I think as new nanotechnology encroaches, getting closer down to greater resolution in both RAMs and magnetic storage, [next technology breakthrough] is disk and memory.

How can solution providers keep that innovative edge?
Wozniak: Almost every time you come up with a solution for someone don’t be in a rush to say I am finished. Take a look at it and say how could I have made it better. Try to do a little better job than the other guy ... that is where excellence comes from.