Steve Wozniak Quotations

Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.

When I have spare time, I catch up on things I've had to postpone due to lack of time.

I want the entire smartphone, the entire Internet, on my wrist.

Your first projects aren't the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn - you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.

You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.

The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn't thought of before and that aren't talked about in the news all the time.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.

A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

I just believe that the way that young people's minds develop is fascinating. If you are doing something for a grade or salary or a reward, it doesn't have as much meaning as creating something for yourself and your own life.

When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

I wish to God that Apple and Google were partners in the future,

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.

Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you're doing because you believe it's right.

I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!

Steve Jobs didn't really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don't deny that

Although I receive a small salary from Apple, I do virtually no real work at the company.

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

When I designed projects in college, he said, let's sell it.

My first transistor radio was the heart of my gadget love today. It fit in my hand and brought me a world of music 24 / 7.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.

I don't know why because I'm nice to him, so there must have been something he didn't like.

But it was kind of fun to have a company, and that was good enough reason to do it. And step by step, boy, it was right timing. Computers were exploding and we were in it exactly at the right time.

I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.

We totally failed on the software applications for it. It went to the stores and everything that sold as the hottest newest thing came back. It didn't work. It wouldn't even turn on anymore.

Steve and I ran the business into 1977 with just a few hundred bucks.

It disturbed me quite a bit when young children had to get on the evacuation buses and leave their pets behind, ... Pets are a part of your family, at least in my opinion. I have five dogs of my own and they're my family. I can't imagine having to leave them behind.

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.

You have to think offensively and defensively and see where your opponent is going to go. Your mind has to be totally aware of the whole situation. That doesn't come the first time you play.

Not every Apple product makes a big enough difference to me to get instantly, although many do.

I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know 'No, he couldn't have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.'

The Mac's a symbol of a whole revolution, and most of us that participated in it from the beginning and believed in it bought into these new ideals of computers to really help people, and not something that you had to fight, memorize and learn, ... That whole revolution just continues in our hearts to this day.

All of a sudden, we needed something like $250,000, so we had to go out and pursue the company in a whole different aspect, and we found somebody who was willing to put their money in.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Imagination is something you do alone.

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,

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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...

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

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

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.

Rockets are bad technology. iPhones are good technology

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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,

Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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."

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

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.

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.

Atari is a very sad story.

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.

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.

It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.

If you try to make such projects, unseen by others, as perfect as any human could, you'll develop skills that other professionals don't have.

I read Google News and use NetNewsWire to keep up with general and tech news.

I had no money. I had no savings account.So I would bring down my color TV set, a Sears TV with a cable snaked into it - they had no video-in back in those days - and hooked it up to the circuit of very few chips and then a little keyboard you could type on. And I was trying to impress people with how did he do it with fewer chips than anyone could ever imagine?