Business Insider reports on the Apple co-founder’s comments, made to 14-year-old entrepreneur Sarina Khemchandani in a video interview that can be watched on YouTube. He agreed to speak with Khemchandani after she reached out to him from her own ReachAStudent program which she uses to interview successful people, allowing students at her school to connect with mentors and share positive insights.
With a new film about Steve Jobs soon to arrive in cinemas, the history of Apple and the people behind it has never been more topical. Although Wozniak is said to like Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, Ashton Kucher’s 2013 take with Jobs attracted controversy for supposed inaccurate portrayals of the role of Steve Jobs in the design of the company’s earliest products.
It appears the suspicions of some sceptical fans have now been confirmed by none other than co-founder Wozniak himself. He told Khemchandani that Jobs “played no role at all” in product development and that it was his own designs that went into production.
He described how he had enjoyed creating computer designs on pieces of paper in his childhood, trying to use ever-fewer parts in each new iteration. With no money to get the designs into production, Wozniak just created endless improvements, designing interfaces for printers, serial ports and floppy disks that would come to define the Apple I and II computers. This would only happen when he met the person who could make his creations reality: Steve Jobs.
Business Insider writes that Woz told Khemchandani: “I wanted to be the engineer, in a laboratory, like a mad scientist. So that was my thing. The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed. So I had created it, and it was just waiting for a company. And Steve Jobs was my good friend, the businessman.”
He says that Jobs “wanted to be important” but “never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn’t know software.” Wozniak is clear that he was the engineer who created the products as personal projects while Jobs was the one who got them out the factory, exhibiting an unusual frankness on the nature of the early Apple.
