#comments

I don’t know if I’ve been reading to much Fake Steve Jobs, but I’m finding the Woz to be a bit annoying. Take this here interview with him that I just read. Ignore his ESL speaking skills and let’s see what he says.

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.

Actually, no, that’s not what happened. In fact, nearly every fact besides “I have the iPhone” and “I brought a bunch of my friends” was a lie that you refute in the very next things you say in the interview!

I actually had figured out I had been running on two hours sleep a night and I wasn’t going to be able to stay up all night. So I finally figured out I could get there at 4 a.m. but some people had stayed up all night. I didn’t want to be in line and have 20, 50 people cut in front of me. I might not get an iPhone. So I came up with this great idea of making numbers for the line the way they do with rock concerts. And I made T-shirts and I got approval from the Apple store guy the day before. [...]

We opened up the door and out there sleeping on the ground were all the people and I took control. I said I am here, we are going to pass out t-shirts and numbers and we passed around numbers each one signed by me. But the first number I passed out was nine. I took one through eight. [...]

And then we went back in the Mall. They were still outside.

Stayed up all night long? Nope. First in line? Nope. Worth a party? Apparently not, since you didn’t actually stay on the line. He actually says he didn’t want to be in line and then have people cut in front of him. So instead, he does the exact same thing to all the other people in the line? What THE FSCK? Check out this guy’s post who actually was there in the line waiting who got pushed back.

Then beyond that, what pushes this over from annoying to outright ass-ism was the fact that he brought 7 of his closest friends to the cut fest. Imagine, if you will, that Apple didn’t have enough stock to go around. This jerk comes in 8 hours late and cuts the line, not just for himself but with his friends? So that eight people who actually had been standing in line the whole time would not actually be able to get theirs? This is what he expected to happen, he expected that he would be screwing not 1 but EIGHT other people from getting an iPhone. Simply because he was too tired to sit, unmoving, in line for a few more hours. As though it takes some kind of strenuous exertion to sit on a line.

And then, AND THEN, even getting there late, even screwing all those people in line, after passing out the shirts that give people their position does he wait with them in the line until the store opens? No. He and his buddies don’t have to wait outside with the unwashed masses, they go back into the empty mall to play their Segway games. What a self absorbed jerk. Seriously.

Segway games you ask? Let me jump around a little and point out how much he loves his Segway.

I got in with my friends and we got our Segways inside and the guard was told who I was and he let us be inside. So we were inside the Mall and everyone else was outside the Mall.

At 5 am we went four people on Segways looking like security.

And then we went back in the Mall. They were still outside. We were in the Mall on Segways. We raced around an empty Mall. We took videos.

I play Segway Polo on a Segway and I take phone calls.

One time I took an hour long call while playing a game of Segway (Polo). It was with the Commerce Department, the National Medal of Technology Subcommittee I was on. And I was chairman of the whole Committee too.

First of all, dude, get over your Segway. Second, if you bought a Segway, you are most likely an idiot, but if you play Segway Polo?? The probabilities are increased to 100%. Third of all, apparently even if Woz is the chairman of a committee he will not take it seriously enough to take time off his incredibly important Segway Polo playing. Disrespecting both the committee and all the people on the committee who take their job seriously. He can’t even fake taking it seriously. Awesome, man, way to be.

Ok, moving on.

The voice quality. Being able to hear it. How it works with my Bluetooth that I like. The iPhone doesn’t work with my Bluetooth.

Sorry, I said skip the ESL stuff.

MOVING on. He says this:

I thought the price point was okay at $600. A lot of people at stores, retailers, before it came out said it was just too expensive. But I mean for the best you would expect to pay more.

But actually he’s whining about the 20 iPhones he got to give out and none of his “friends” are giving him back the $100 credit. First of all if $600 was reasonable (and I agree that it was) any amount of anything back is just gravy. Second of all, it’s easy to get the credit, just get your friends to send you the numbers they got. Done. I already did just that.

He gives love to the iPhone interface, lots of it, and suggests that Apple is the only one who could have done it right:

I think if someone else had thought about it and put some plus and minus zoom controls on the screen and let you zoom in it would have been a miserable experience. So I think it was a combination of factors that made it work.

And then moments later he blasts Apple for not making intuitive interfaces anymore:

But a lot of those dreams of the computer being so humanized, 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 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.

Um, ok.

He thinks that barely after Apple, Google is the most innovative company out there. Because of what? Their Calendar. Wow, that’s innovative. What about GMail? Well, he doesn’t really use it, but he did sign up for it because he signs up for everything so he can get his favourite names.

I have GMail accounts that I check but I don’t really use yet. I wanted to nail down my name: Steve.Wozniak, SteveWoz, all my favorite versions of my name. So I got them all. Because other people try to jump in. Sometimes a service will start up and somebody else will have SteveWoz and they’ll have Woz and I’m all pissed.

Don’t sign up for Woz accounts. Woz get angry, Woz get STRONG!

Ugh, anyway. There it is. Am I wrong about all this? I’d love to be, I’d love to go back and love the loveable Woz.