Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has posted a statement online [see link below] in which he denied some of the comments attributed to him in an article I wrote recently.

In that statement, he suggests that I pushed him to make some of those comments, that I had an agenda in interviewing him, and that he feels used.

I find Mr Wozniak's response shocking as it is a serious attack – not only on my credibility, but also on that of the press in general. My only agenda in interviewing Mr Wozniak was to get his honestly-held thoughts on current events in technology, particularly in respect to the company he helped build.

Mr Wozniak did indeed make all the comments attributed to him, and he certainly was not pushed or used to accomplish any agenda, because one did not exist. I asked very open-ended questions – what was his opinion on Apple switching to Intel, what did he think about iPods, and where did he think Microsoft was heading? If anything, Mr. Wozniak steered the interview; any other questions I asked arose from where he took the conversation.

We are posting verbatim transcripts of the relevant sections of the interview, as well as an audio recording of the full interview, so that readers and listeners can decide for themselves whether Mr Wozniak was pushed or used. I recommend listening to the audio to hear the full context, flow and nuance of the conversation.


Verbatim extract from interview:

Q: So there are two interesting things going on with Apple these days. First is the switch to Intel processors. What do you think about that?

A: Even from when it was first announced, I was kind of bored with it. The reasoning for it was correct. We want faster laptops and the like and the key to that is performance per watt. So it was exactly to a computer architect designer... I wish that Motorola had a brand new silicon process that would be applied forever, like IBM had copper to get higher speeds at lower power. No, Intel just did a very good logic design to not turn on more than needed at any time on the chip and it keeps the power lower, so we'll have higher-speed Macintoshs. And we switched before to a Power PC. Anyone who went through that transition of going from one processor to another with emulators to make the old stuff work, this one actually should be simpler and easier because we've developed for so long on Intel hardware anyway.

Q: Do you think on a philosophical level though there's a good many people out there who think, oh I can't believe Apple has switched to Intel, it's kind of like consorting with the enemy?

A: Absolutely. And you said it exactly right, it's like consorting with the enemy. We have had this long, long history of saying the enemy is the big black-hatted guys, they kind of represent evil, and we are different and by being different we're better. All of a sudden we're the same in this hardware regard, it's a little hard to swallow your own words from the past. And if it wasn't needed, I would say we shouldn't do it, and I have some questions as to how much it's needed. But I don't really have any fears or it's not going to bother me that some software isn't going to work for a while. I mean, anybody who jumps into it real early still has their old computer anyway.