What does Woz have to offer Apple nowadays? I'm sure there are other Apple executives that understand Apple's market niche way better than Woz does, and he's certainly no Jobs replacement as a marketeer - there doesn't appear to be a drop of slickness or aesthetic sensibility in his blood.
While I agree that Woz doesn't look as good in a black turtleneck as does Jobs, I personally feel that he has a LOT to offer the company.
I know Woz had an aircraft accident that resulted in brain damage. I have only ever found interviews and videos of him AFTER that accident. Does anyone know what he was like BEFORE the accident and how big a change in personality/problem solving he experienced?
Yes. I have known him since 1978.
It took him nearly two years after the plane accident to "snap out of if". in fact, a friend of mine that talked with him at a computer convention in Ohio about 3 or 4 years after the accident told me that Woz told a group of people at that convention that he was back to work at Apple, going through the motions every day, when suddenly, he looked down at his Hamilton Pulsar watch and realized that he had been in a fog for the past two years.
According to his comments, after that, he was "back to his old self".
I have had many, many email and phone conversations over the years with Woz, and he is just as sharp now as he was before the accident. Which, BTW, is pretty damned sharp!
About half the desktop systems were Mac clones. No real Macs. And actually, in spite of the job security it wasn't that much fun supporting all these junky machines. From that job, I learned everything *not* to do.
Were they the Power Computing machines, or those junky Motorola clones?
I just emailed Woz with an email I entitled "Storm a-brewin' over at Slashdot."
His instantaneous reply follows. When I asked him if I could Re-post it here, his reply was "PLEASE do that for me!"
So, here it is, straight from the Woz's Mouth, so to speak:
When I first saw the headlines it was just another totally wrong one. I did an interview in Brighton the other day with this female Reuters journalist. The entire interview was about Fusion-io, at the SQLbits European conference, with myself and David Flynn, our CEO. At the end she asked about whether I'd return to Apple and I thought and said "no" and told her some reasons it was impossible. So she sits there and asks "with all the exciting things going on at Apple, would you consider going back?"...I said "yes" but explained that it could not happen. What you read is based on the one "yes". So I didn't read a single article about it. I was on planes and am writing a speech now for a humanist award I'm receiving tonight in Boston and don't have time to get into this one. Too bad.
This reporter took notes by hand but I think the Fusion-io publicist Shannon might have recorded it.
Woz has even personally bitched about the BT lack-of-stereo support thing to me a couple of years ago in an email.
Woz bitched to you over email about the lack of a specific feature? Brush with greatness!!!!!!
Woz is VERY accessible. I have known him personally since 1978. We don't hang out or anything (I live in Indiana); but I often have email volleys with him. He is as guile-less as Jobs is a Jerk.
Thunderbolt can not replace video cards / cpu / ram and it's bandwidth it like only pci-e x4.
So a mini with a weak cpu with low end on board video will make for a poor system and only 2gb base ram is to small at least 4gb is needed.
Thunder is good for EXT video IN, EXT HDD's and other stuff.
Stop thinking about the first-gen (CopperBolt, if you will) limitations.
While I agree that TB is not quite there yet for external video cards, there are a LOT of applications that could benefit from the technology right now, that would alleviate SOME of the need for a Mac Pro-class tower for SOME users. Actually, a LOT of users.
You are trying to explain the fundamental concept of dynamic HTML generation, and all I wanted to know is how a web-coder could actually take an active role in determining when the webserver spawned THREADS.
2. Knowing Woz since 1978, I can tell you that he is one of the most OPEN persons on the planet. If you ask him a question, he will answer, unless the answer requires divulging a secret R&D project, and then he can hardly contain himself! I remember having some phone conversations back around 1979 regarding some work on what was to eventually become the Lisa (yes, the article was dead wrong. He worked on the Lisa project, as well as the pretty much only designer of the Apple 1 and ][, as well as the principal naysayer regarding the reliability-killing overcomplexity of the Apple/// design!). And, everyone forgets that he is the principal designer of the Apple ][ gs; a machine that was sadly just a little too late to the party, but a DAMNED fine update!
And knowing Woz for as long as I have, I can also tell you that his answer was NOT "off-the-cuff". He puts thought into every question in every situation. That's just the the "engineer" in him.
I have to agree with everyone that thinks the Woz wouldn't be a good fit for the current "Apple Way", since the man that was so devoted to the "User Experience" turned into the "Big Brother" that he railed against at the start, and now has his Users doing the "Lock Step" in chains!
As I said in a previous post, above: He would actually be an effective "cut the bullshit, Steve!" foil against Jobs' more "closed"-architecture tendencies.
apple dominated, threw it away, disappeared for 30 years, and now makes consumer gadgets for over-privileged ypuuies, and while they might dominate that niche market, apple has been nothing but a smoke n mirrors producer who really should have died back in the 90's with every other walled garden propitiatory tech company
Woz is a technical guy and is no longer needed there.
Your statement makes it sound like all he can do is design circuitry and code.
Although he is a brilliant designer/developer, his return would also breathe new life into the company's other engineers, and would, quite frankly, make the stock market a little less jittery about "what will happen to Apple" in Jobs' absence.
I think he should return in his prior role as "Apple Fellow", and do what he does best at this point: Spread good will, and provide a "You can't fire me!" foil to some of Jobs' more "form over function" product design decisions. For example, there is NO WAY the iOS devices would have escaped from the R&D lab without an SD slot and mini USB connector, and without stereo Bluetooth headset support. I'm speculating about the USB and SD slot stuff; but Woz has even personally bitched about the BT lack-of-stereo support thing to me a couple of years ago in an email.
I have only about 6 months' less experience with Apple products than the Steves do, and I'm quite sure that Apple would benefit greatly from his engineering expertise, creative insight, and especially his attitude and ambassadorship.
The last time they licensed the operating system to non-Apple hardware it nearly killed the company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone
I'd expect them to license the OS again approximately when hell freezes over.
As a tech support professional who supported a mixed environment of Mac clone desktops, Windows 95 desktops, and Sun Solaris servers in the mid-90s, however, I hope I'm wrong about this. That environment was a tech support full-employment act! We had four full time staffers doing tech support for an office of 30 employees! Good times.
Boy, did YOU guys have the PHBs snowed!
And what percentage of your support was the Macs? And did you have any REAL Macs? What was the support percentage of THOSE machines?
Ya know, I've been an Apple fan (not fanboi!) and owner since the Apple 1, and I'm with the GP on this one. I'd LOVE to have an affordable Mac mini-tower with a few PCIe slots (3 would probably do), that cost closer to the iMac than the Mac Pro.
However, having said that, I'm pretty sure that when Thunderbolt catches on, we'll all (well, not ALL, this IS/. afterall!) start thinking OUTSIDE of the box...
If you have a lot of users active at once, the web server will have a bunch of threads operating at once, so there's potential for serious race condition issues.
I get that; and have experienced it as a HTML vict... er, user, many times!
However, I still don't see how the web "app" coder (HTML is WAY too primitive to actually be called a programming language, IMHO, hence JavaScript, Java, PHP, RoR, etc.). But, in all those languages, I have yet to see a "Thread Control" API. So, how does the web coder himself actually design/code a web app to create/destroy THREADS "on purpose", rather than the webserver "itself" simply "deciding" when/if a new thread is created, suspended, or destroyed, based on its own rules, rather than the whim of the web app developer, who's working in Dreamweaver, etc., or even coding the web app directly in a text editor?
Again, I'm not trying to be confrontational; just showing my web app ignorance. Or am I?
Is an app that sits between your personal and phone info and all your other apps and controls what data gets presented to each app
You mean, something that keeps each app in something akin to its own "play area". Kind of like a kid's sandbox...
Now only if there was a mobile OS that did that for you. And even better, one that automatically asked you for permission when certain "privacy-related" features, like location services, are accessed by an app for the first time, and gave you an easy-to use way to see if an app had tried to do that in the past 24 hours, and even better, let you change your mind about permissions after you had already installed the app, on a global, or app-by-app basis.
Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.
Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!
Your TV (computer) could choose for you, based on what you say you like, what your social-network-friends like, what's popular, what the network recommends, etc.
The EMACS comment made me realize he didn't know what he was talking about. I just checked on my OS X install--EMACS is already there. And even if it weren't, he could use one of those package managers he mentioned and just install the thing.
But really, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to be a big-time web developer and just can't grasp using anything other than EMACS. I'm not a huge TextMate fan, but it's always been my understanding it's the "lighter" editor--for serious work, you want BBEdit. Or Coda or any number of other editors. With OS X, you'll get access to all the *nix editors, plus the OS X editors. It's such a non-issue.
Yeah, the 'tard couldn't even be bothered to look on MacUpdate under Emacs to find not only that there is even a nice little clickable app that invokes the OS X-native install of Emacs (as well as the native installs of Vim and Nano), but that there are at least 2 other versions of Emacs for OS X listed on MacUpdate.
I don't use it, because I hate memorizing complicated keyboard incantations; but I have had Aquamacs installed since at least the 10.3 days; so I knew right off the bat he was a third-class idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Jobs only ever cared about the user experience and that's why Apple dominates.
100% of fanboi bigots adds up to a market share of 7.2% as Eilleen Regina sang That don't impress me much
Come back when you have a 10th of his talents, Troll.
What does Woz have to offer Apple nowadays? I'm sure there are other Apple executives that understand Apple's market niche way better than Woz does, and he's certainly no Jobs replacement as a marketeer - there doesn't appear to be a drop of slickness or aesthetic sensibility in his blood.
While I agree that Woz doesn't look as good in a black turtleneck as does Jobs, I personally feel that he has a LOT to offer the company.
See my previous comment in this thread to see why.
I know Woz had an aircraft accident that resulted in brain damage. I have only ever found interviews and videos of him AFTER that accident. Does anyone know what he was like BEFORE the accident and how big a change in personality/problem solving he experienced?
Yes. I have known him since 1978.
It took him nearly two years after the plane accident to "snap out of if". in fact, a friend of mine that talked with him at a computer convention in Ohio about 3 or 4 years after the accident told me that Woz told a group of people at that convention that he was back to work at Apple, going through the motions every day, when suddenly, he looked down at his Hamilton Pulsar watch and realized that he had been in a fog for the past two years.
According to his comments, after that, he was "back to his old self".
I have had many, many email and phone conversations over the years with Woz, and he is just as sharp now as he was before the accident. Which, BTW, is pretty damned sharp!
About half the desktop systems were Mac clones. No real Macs. And actually, in spite of the job security it wasn't that much fun supporting all these junky machines. From that job, I learned everything *not* to do.
Were they the Power Computing machines, or those junky Motorola clones?
First, some background from me (macs4all) :
I just emailed Woz with an email I entitled "Storm a-brewin' over at Slashdot."
His instantaneous reply follows. When I asked him if I could Re-post it here, his reply was "PLEASE do that for me!"
So, here it is, straight from the Woz's Mouth, so to speak:
When I first saw the headlines it was just another totally wrong one. I did an interview in Brighton the other day with this female Reuters journalist. The entire interview was about Fusion-io, at the SQLbits European conference, with myself and David Flynn, our CEO. At the end she asked about whether I'd return to Apple and I thought and said "no" and told her some reasons it was impossible. So she sits there and asks "with all the exciting things going on at Apple, would you consider going back?"...I said "yes" but explained that it could not happen. What you read is based on the one "yes". So I didn't read a single article about it. I was on planes and am writing a speech now for a humanist award I'm receiving tonight in Boston and don't have time to get into this one. Too bad.
This reporter took notes by hand but I think the Fusion-io publicist Shannon might have recorded it.
Woz has even personally bitched about the BT lack-of-stereo support thing to me a couple of years ago in an email.
Woz bitched to you over email about the lack of a specific feature? Brush with greatness!!!!!!
Woz is VERY accessible. I have known him personally since 1978. We don't hang out or anything (I live in Indiana); but I often have email volleys with him. He is as guile-less as Jobs is a Jerk.
so your convinced that since a marketing team threw pro at the end of a name that it is not?
Are you really going to sit there and call THIS a "consumer gadget"?
You're retarded. Hand in your geek card and delete your slashdot account immediately.
Thunderbolt can not replace video cards / cpu / ram and it's bandwidth it like only pci-e x4.
So a mini with a weak cpu with low end on board video will make for a poor system and only 2gb base ram is to small at least 4gb is needed.
Thunder is good for EXT video IN, EXT HDD's and other stuff.
Stop thinking about the first-gen (CopperBolt, if you will) limitations.
While I agree that TB is not quite there yet for external video cards, there are a LOT of applications that could benefit from the technology right now, that would alleviate SOME of the need for a Mac Pro-class tower for SOME users. Actually, a LOT of users.
You are trying to explain the fundamental concept of dynamic HTML generation, and all I wanted to know is how a web-coder could actually take an active role in determining when the webserver spawned THREADS.
And not Apple?
1. Who says he hasn't?
/// design!). And, everyone forgets that he is the principal designer of the Apple ][ gs; a machine that was sadly just a little too late to the party, but a DAMNED fine update!
2. Knowing Woz since 1978, I can tell you that he is one of the most OPEN persons on the planet. If you ask him a question, he will answer, unless the answer requires divulging a secret R&D project, and then he can hardly contain himself! I remember having some phone conversations back around 1979 regarding some work on what was to eventually become the Lisa (yes, the article was dead wrong. He worked on the Lisa project, as well as the pretty much only designer of the Apple 1 and ][, as well as the principal naysayer regarding the reliability-killing overcomplexity of the Apple
And knowing Woz for as long as I have, I can also tell you that his answer was NOT "off-the-cuff". He puts thought into every question in every situation. That's just the the "engineer" in him.
I have to agree with everyone that thinks the Woz wouldn't be a good fit for the current "Apple Way", since the man that was so devoted to the "User Experience" turned into the "Big Brother" that he railed against at the start, and now has his Users doing the "Lock Step" in chains!
As I said in a previous post, above: He would actually be an effective "cut the bullshit, Steve!" foil against Jobs' more "closed"-architecture tendencies.
He's a lot cooler than Woz.
Yeah; but he blew it when he went postal about BeOS.
apple dominated, threw it away, disappeared for 30 years, and now makes consumer gadgets for over-privileged ypuuies, and while they might dominate that niche market, apple has been nothing but a smoke n mirrors producer who really should have died back in the 90's with every other walled garden propitiatory tech company
So, the Mac Pro is a "consumer gadget"?
Woz is a technical guy and is no longer needed there.
Your statement makes it sound like all he can do is design circuitry and code.
Although he is a brilliant designer/developer, his return would also breathe new life into the company's other engineers, and would, quite frankly, make the stock market a little less jittery about "what will happen to Apple" in Jobs' absence.
I think he should return in his prior role as "Apple Fellow", and do what he does best at this point: Spread good will, and provide a "You can't fire me!" foil to some of Jobs' more "form over function" product design decisions. For example, there is NO WAY the iOS devices would have escaped from the R&D lab without an SD slot and mini USB connector, and without stereo Bluetooth headset support. I'm speculating about the USB and SD slot stuff; but Woz has even personally bitched about the BT lack-of-stereo support thing to me a couple of years ago in an email.
I have only about 6 months' less experience with Apple products than the Steves do, and I'm quite sure that Apple would benefit greatly from his engineering expertise, creative insight, and especially his attitude and ambassadorship.
3. Wozniak continued and continues knowing this as his Apple wages/shares provide him a tidy sum.
I agree with your first two statements; but the one about the money is absurd.
Even when he worked full-time at Apple, he INSISTED that his salary be no more than one of their typical engineers.
His millions has come primarily from Apple stock, and some shrewd investments he has done over the years.
Too bad he didn't get that Gulfstream deal like Jobs, though; he would've gone for that one!
The last time they licensed the operating system to non-Apple hardware it nearly killed the company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone
I'd expect them to license the OS again approximately when hell freezes over.
As a tech support professional who supported a mixed environment of Mac clone desktops, Windows 95 desktops, and Sun Solaris servers in the mid-90s, however, I hope I'm wrong about this. That environment was a tech support full-employment act! We had four full time staffers doing tech support for an office of 30 employees! Good times.
Boy, did YOU guys have the PHBs snowed!
And what percentage of your support was the Macs? And did you have any REAL Macs? What was the support percentage of THOSE machines?
Inquiring minds want to know...
If you want a tower, get a Mac Pro.
Ya know, I've been an Apple fan (not fanboi!) and owner since the Apple 1, and I'm with the GP on this one. I'd LOVE to have an affordable Mac mini-tower with a few PCIe slots (3 would probably do), that cost closer to the iMac than the Mac Pro.
/. afterall!) start thinking OUTSIDE of the box...
However, having said that, I'm pretty sure that when Thunderbolt catches on, we'll all (well, not ALL, this IS
3. Apple gets real TRIM for all supported SSD. (based on his past interest in the disc/storage areas)
I believe that is coming in OS X 10.7 (Lion), and if you're a bit handy (pun intended), you can enable it now in 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
His engineering skills are clearly obsolete by several decades
Wrong.
If you have a lot of users active at once, the web server will have a bunch of threads operating at once, so there's potential for serious race condition issues.
I get that; and have experienced it as a HTML vict... er, user, many times!
However, I still don't see how the web "app" coder (HTML is WAY too primitive to actually be called a programming language, IMHO, hence JavaScript, Java, PHP, RoR, etc.). But, in all those languages, I have yet to see a "Thread Control" API. So, how does the web coder himself actually design/code a web app to create/destroy THREADS "on purpose", rather than the webserver "itself" simply "deciding" when/if a new thread is created, suspended, or destroyed, based on its own rules, rather than the whim of the web app developer, who's working in Dreamweaver, etc., or even coding the web app directly in a text editor?
Again, I'm not trying to be confrontational; just showing my web app ignorance. Or am I?
Is an app that sits between your personal and phone info and all your other apps and controls what data gets presented to each app
You mean, something that keeps each app in something akin to its own "play area". Kind of like a kid's sandbox...
Now only if there was a mobile OS that did that for you. And even better, one that automatically asked you for permission when certain "privacy-related" features, like location services, are accessed by an app for the first time, and gave you an easy-to use way to see if an app had tried to do that in the past 24 hours, and even better, let you change your mind about permissions after you had already installed the app, on a global, or app-by-app basis.
Oh, wait...
Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.
Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!
Your TV (computer) could choose for you, based on what you say you like, what your social-network-friends like, what's popular, what the network recommends, etc.
But then, you get situations like "My TiVO Thinks I'm a Pregnant Gay Man."
Oh, and before it starts, this is NOT an invitation for another round of puerile Apple "Gay" jokes. That meme's getting really old...
Miss Violet Dudley, I presume!
Why how did you know my moniker?
By the provocative initials on you k-nickers!
I could go on and on; but for those of you who were born after proinhibition, please check out:
The Tale Of the Giant Rat of Sumatra.
Hey, the next generation has to be educated SOMEhow!
Can we have this on comments too ?
Now THAT would be great!
The EMACS comment made me realize he didn't know what he was talking about. I just checked on my OS X install--EMACS is already there. And even if it weren't, he could use one of those package managers he mentioned and just install the thing.
But really, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to be a big-time web developer and just can't grasp using anything other than EMACS. I'm not a huge TextMate fan, but it's always been my understanding it's the "lighter" editor--for serious work, you want BBEdit. Or Coda or any number of other editors. With OS X, you'll get access to all the *nix editors, plus the OS X editors. It's such a non-issue.
Yeah, the 'tard couldn't even be bothered to look on MacUpdate under Emacs to find not only that there is even a nice little clickable app that invokes the OS X-native install of Emacs (as well as the native installs of Vim and Nano), but that there are at least 2 other versions of Emacs for OS X listed on MacUpdate.
I don't use it, because I hate memorizing complicated keyboard incantations; but I have had Aquamacs installed since at least the 10.3 days; so I knew right off the bat he was a third-class idiot.