Part IThe Story
The Machine Only One Man Could Answer For
Sometime after the summer of 1977, Apple Computer began quietly trying to buy back its first product. There was no recall and no press release. There was a discount, a trade-in allowance toward the new Apple II, and a reason that the company's own chroniclers state with almost comic bluntness: the only person who could answer most customer support questions about the Apple I was the man who had designed it. Apple did not have a support department. It had Steve Wozniak. When the old boards came back, Apple destroyed them.
Nearly half a century later, the surviving boards are relics. In October 2014 the Henry Ford Museum paid $905,000 at a Bonhams auction for an Apple I with its keyboard, monitor, cassette decks, and manual. In January 2026 the validation prototype, the last version of the printed circuit board before production, sold for $2,750,000, roughly five times its estimate. As of August 2022, collectors could account for between 62 and 82 of the roughly 200 units ever built. The rest are presumably in landfills, or in garages, or were fed into whatever Apple used to dispose of evidence that its founding engineer was a single point of failure.
The joke underneath all of this, and Wozniak is a man who has spent his life building jokes underneath things, is that he never meant to sell the machine at all. By March 1, 1976, he had finished the basic design. His plan was to hand out the schematics at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, to the hobbyists he had been trying to impress since his first meeting there a year earlier, and let anyone with a soldering iron build one. First he offered the design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard. HP turned it down. He offered it again. By his count, HP turned it down five times. Then a 21-year-old friend named Steve Jobs, who had watched the machine draw a crowd at Homebrew, suggested they sell it instead.
The computer that launched a company now worth just over $4 trillion was, in its designer's original conception, a gift. The company that grew from it spent part of its second year trying to get the gift back, because it lived entirely inside one man's head.
Everything that follows orbits that problem. What happens to a thing when the only person who fully understands it would rather give it away? And what happens to the person?
By the Numbers
The Wozniak Ledger
$666.66Apple I retail price, chosen because he liked repeating digits
~200Apple I units ever produced
5Times Hewlett-Packard declined his computer design
50Chips he cut from Atari's Breakout board
$10MPersonal Apple stock he offered to early employees at the IPO
85%Share of Apple's sales from his Apple II line in early 1985
$2.75MAuction price of the Apple I validation prototype, 2026
The Father Who Explained Everything Except His Work
Francis Jacob Wozniak, called Jerry, was born in Michigan in 1925 and became an engineer at the Lockheed Corporation in the valley south of San Francisco, back when it was still more orchard than industry. His job was secret. His son would later write that it was top secret and involved electronics, and that was about as much as the family knew. What Jerry Wozniak would talk about, at length and with apparent patience, was how electronic components worked: what a resistor did, what a transistor did, why a circuit behaved the way it behaved. His son, in iWoz, the autobiography he produced in 2006 with the writer Gina Smith, credits these explanations as a major reason for everything that came after.
So the first lesson was double. The machine could be explained completely, down to the last component. The purpose of the machine did not have to be explained at all.
His mother, Margaret Louise Kern, came from Washington state and brought something different into the house on the peninsula. Years later Wozniak's sister Leslie, who became a grant adviser at a San Francisco foundation for at-risk youth, said it was their mother who introduced activism to the three children. Margaret also, briefly, lost control of her son's name. The birth certificate issued in San Jose after August 11, 1950, reads "Stephan Gary Wozniak." She said she had meant "Stephen." He has used the version she intended for his entire life, which makes his legal identity the first of many names that never quite settled on him: Stephan, Stephen, Woz, Berkeley Blue, Rocky Raccoon Clark, the Wonderful Wizard of Woz, the Second Steve.
He read the Tom Swift Jr. books, in which a boy inventor builds rockets and submarines in his father's laboratory, and he later credited them with making him want to be an engineer. He watched Star Trek and went to Star Trek conventions, which he has named as part of the inspiration for starting Apple. He was good at mathematics, very good, winning the math awards at his schools. And he was shy, in the specific and durable way of boys who find machines more legible than people.
In a 2012 interview, he described what that shyness produced. He had worked out, he said, "a lot of philosophies of how to be a good person, how to treat people," and he had worked them out "thinking over and over, reflecting inside my mind the way shy people do, and I was very shy, and coming up with my own little keys and rules for life, and they stayed with me." In a 2016 Reddit AMA he put a date on the project: "I had my lifetime philosophies down by around age 20 and I am thankful for them."
A man who had his rules finished by twenty is a man who will spend the next half-century being tested against them. Most of the tests involved money.
He graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino in 1968 and went off to the University of Colorado Boulder, which lasted one year. The accounts diverge in a way that is characteristic of his life. The encyclopedic version says he was expelled for hacking the university's computer system. The version in iWoz is gentler: steep out-of-state tuition, plus an "inadvertent expense" he had run up for the computer department, made a second year impossible. Twenty years later, in 1989, the same university gave him an honorary doctorate. He later donated funds to create something there called the Woz Lab. The institution that could not afford him at eighteen was, by his forties, being paid by him to keep the lights on for students like him.
The Economy of Fewer Chips
In June 1971, after enrolling at De Anza College and before transferring to Berkeley, Wozniak built his first computer with a neighborhood friend named Bill Fernandez. It predated usable microprocessors, affordable screens, and keyboards; it ran on punch cards and on twenty TTL chips donated by an acquaintance. They named it Cream Soda, after the drink they consumed while building it. A newspaper reporter came to write about it, stepped on the power supply cable, and blew it up.
Wozniak did not mourn. The machine, he said, had been "a good prelude to my thinking 5 years later with the Apple I and Apple II computers." The prelude was the constraint. Twenty chips. A machine that could not afford a single extra part.
Parsimony became his signature, less a design philosophy than a physical reflex. Around this time, on a date with Alice Robertson, the woman who would become his first wife, he encountered Pong in a bowling alley and simply stood there staring at it, amazed that a computer could be used for play. He went home and rebuilt the game himself on an ordinary television set, and then improved on it: his version displayed the score onscreen and flashed four-letter words when a player missed. When he later showed it to Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer who had designed the original Pong, Alcorn offered him a job on the spot. Wozniak declined. He could never leave Hewlett-Packard, he explained, where he was designing calculators and where he seems to have believed he would work forever.
In 1973 his friend Jobs, then an Atari technician in Los Gatos, was assigned to prototype a circuit board for a new arcade game called Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, the company was paying a bonus of $100 for every chip eliminated from the design. Jobs knew little about board design. He proposed a deal: Wozniak would do the engineering, and they would split the fee evenly. Wozniak, moonlighting from HP, did the work in four days and cut fifty chips from the board, partly by using RAM to represent the bricks. The prototype lacked scoring and coin mechanisms and could not be used as built. Atari paid the full bonus anyway.
Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had paid $700, and handed him $350. Or Atari had paid $750, and he handed him $375; the two main tellings differ by twenty-five dollars, which feels, given the eventual scale of these two men's fortunes, like an accounting error committed by God. Either way, the actual bonus was $5,000. Wozniak did not learn this for roughly ten years. When he did, he was dismayed. What he said afterward is the part that matters: if Jobs had told him the truth and said he needed the money, he would have given it to him.
It is the most revealing sentence in the early history of Apple, and it is not about Jobs.
The obsession with fewer chips reached its apotheosis in the machine that became the Apple I. In 1974, visiting the famous phone phreak John Draper, Wozniak watched Draper connect a modem to the ARPANET and use a teleprinter to play chess against someone in Boston. He decided to build a cheap terminal of his own, one that would plug into a household television and use an inexpensive keyboard from Sears. Then, in March 1975, he went to his first Homebrew meeting, saw the new microcomputers, and decided the terminal should have a processor inside it. "After my first meeting," he wrote, "I started designing the computer that would later be known as the Apple I. It was that inspiring."
He could not afford a processor. The Motorola 6800 he preferred cost about $175; Intel's 8080 cost $179. So he did what shy, patient people do with problems they cannot yet solve. He watched, and learned, and designed computers on paper, waiting for the day he could buy the chip. Then MOS Technology released the 6502 for roughly $25, designed by engineers who had defected from the 6800 team, sharing much of its architecture. Wozniak's paper computer needed only minor changes. He wrote a BASIC for it first, then built the machine to run it.
There is a detail in the Apple I that I find almost unbearably elegant. The processor ran at 1.022727 megahertz, an absurd-looking figure until you learn that it is exactly two-sevenths of the NTSC color carrier frequency. He chose it because it simplified the video circuitry: one clock, deriving from the television standard, doing double duty. The computer's heartbeat was borrowed from the TV set it plugged into. Fewer parts. Always fewer parts.
The Prankster's Method
Jobs and Wozniak met in 1971, introduced by Fernandez, who had gone to Homestead High with the younger Steve. Wozniak was twenty-one. Jobs was sixteen. The recommendation Fernandez gave, as Wozniak remembered it, contained two clauses, and it is worth noticing which one came second.
— Steve Wozniak, ABC News, 2007We first met in 1971 during my college years, while he was in high school. A friend said, 'you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.' So he introduced us.
He also plays pranks. For Wozniak this was not a character note. It was a credential.
That fall he read "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" in the October 1971 issue of Esquire, an article about devices that could seize control of the long-distance telephone network by emitting specific tones. He built one. The field test has entered legend: he used it to call Vatican City while pretending to be Henry Kissinger, asking to speak to the pope. His design became good enough to earn him a handle in the phreaking underground, Berkeley Blue. Jobs, who had the instinct that Wozniak lacked, sold roughly two hundred of the boxes at $150 each and split the profits. Jobs later told his biographer that if not for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."
That line usually gets read as a statement about capital, or about partnership. It is also a statement about method. The blue box was a prank that worked as a product. It was a demonstration that a system everyone assumed was sealed had been left open by engineers who could not imagine the attacker. Decades later, Wozniak explained the flaw with a kind of admiring disbelief: Bell's designers "just didn't think people would be able to build tone generators in about... forever."
The same man, asked in 2016 about the FBI's demand that Apple unlock an iPhone, said something that lives in tension with Berkeley Blue. "Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses," he said. "I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside." The phreak who found the phone network's back door grew into a man who deletes his own back doors before anyone else can find them. Both instincts come from the same place: an unusual comfort with the fact that a working system contains more possibilities than its builders intended.
His pranks were, above all, feats of engineering in the service of belief. As a boy he hid an electronic metronome in a school locker, back when very few people could build one, and wired it so that a tinfoil switch made the ticking speed up when the door opened. At the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, the same show where the Apple II made its debut, he and two accomplices, Adam Schoolsky and Randy Wigginton, distributed brochures for a computer that did not exist. It was called the Zaltair, a parody of the MITS Altair 8800 and of the fad for Z-names that followed Zilog's Z-80 chip. He later said they printed 20,000 of them. The copy promised a machine that solved every problem in the world, including a language called BAZIC that let users "define your own language... a feature we call perZonality."
The craftsmanship was the point. He added fake MITS trademarks and a MITS shipping label. He wrote a fake quote from MITS president Ed Roberts in which the first letters of the words spelled out the name of a rival firm, Processor Technology, a false trail to keep anyone from tracing the joke back to Apple. He made sure in advance that MITS would not be at the show. It turned out that a MITS representative was there, taking stacks of the brochures.
Jobs received one. He fell for it completely, and even took pride that the Apple II compared well against the Zaltair in the brochure's comparison chart. Wozniak said nothing. For eight years. In 1985, the year both men would leave Apple, he gave Jobs a framed copy as a birthday present.
Consider the timing and the patience. The man who did not learn the truth about the Breakout money for ten years kept the truth about the Zaltair from his partner for eight. One concealment was about money and the other was about a joke. Only one of them, in Wozniak's moral system, would have been worth keeping.
Five Times No, Then Once Yes
The Hewlett-Packard that rejected the Apple I five times was the company Wozniak had told Al Alcorn he could never leave. It is worth sitting with how badly he wanted HP to take the design, because the alternative, starting a company, was not one he wanted. He wanted to be an engineer. He wanted his machine to exist. He wanted his friends at Homebrew to have schematics. The idea of selling anything came from elsewhere.
Jobs proposed that they build and sell bare printed circuit boards to hobbyists. Wozniak was skeptical. The argument that finally moved him, as the story has been passed down, was not about markets or money. Even if they failed, Jobs said, they could tell their grandchildren they had once had their own company. It was a pitch aimed with great precision at a man who cared about stories more than returns.
To raise the money for the first batch of boards, Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus, reportedly for $1,500, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 programmable calculator, reportedly for $500. Neither buyer paid the full amount; together they raised about $1,300. On April 1, 1976, April Fools' Day, which is either a coincidence or the universe's most on-the-nose prank, the Apple Computer Company was formed as a California partnership among Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.
Wayne deserves his own compressed biography, because his life rhymes with Wozniak's in a minor key. He was the chief draftsman at Atari, older than the two Steves, and he took a 10 percent stake in exchange for adult supervision. He drew the company's first logo, an intricate engraving of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. He had also watched a venture of his own fail four years earlier, which left him gun-shy about personal liability in a partnership with two young men who had no assets. On April 12, twelve days after the founding, he sold his share back to them for $800. Wayne walked away from Apple out of fear. Wozniak would later walk away, in slower motion, out of something closer to indifference. Both men ended up outside the fortune they helped start, and only one of them seems to have been at peace with it.
The name came from Jobs, back from an Oregon commune called the All-One Farm and, by his own account, "on one of my fruitarian diets." He thought it sounded fun and unintimidating, "plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book." Wozniak remembers it as a story about an apple orchard.
What happened next has hardened into mythology, and Wozniak has spent years chipping at the myth. The garage, for instance: he has called the belief that Apple was founded in the Jobs family garage on Crist Drive in Los Altos "a bit of a myth." They started in Jobs's bedroom. They moved some work to the garage only when the bedroom filled up.
At a final Homebrew demonstration, Paul Terrell, who was opening a computer store in Mountain View called the Byte Shop, saw the machine and liked it. The next day Jobs tried to sell him bare boards. Terrell did not want bare boards. He would take fifty units at $500 apiece, cash on delivery, but only fully assembled. The first customer, in other words, rewrote the product. Apple was no longer a kit supplier to hobbyists. It was a maker of finished boards.
The two founders did not have the money for the parts. Jobs took Terrell's purchase order to Cramer Electronics, a national parts distributor, and proposed a deal to the credit manager. The Byte Shop order was COD, he explained. If Cramer would extend the parts on net-30 terms, Apple would build the machines, deliver them, collect from Terrell, and pay Cramer. The credit manager called Terrell to check. Terrell said that if the computers showed up, Jobs would have the money. The two Steves and a small crew worked day and night and delivered on time. Terrell, it turned out, had expected complete computers with cases, monitors, and keyboards, and was surprised by a stack of assembled boards. He paid anyway.
The price for the retail version was set by Wozniak, and it is the most Wozniak number in the history of commerce: $666.66. He later said he had no idea of any connection to the number of the beast. He simply liked repeating digits, and $666.66 happened to be a one-third markup on the $500 wholesale price. The designer had embedded a joke in the price tag of the first product, a joke only he could see, and the joke was arithmetic.
The first Apple I off the line ended up in a high school math classroom and then at Liza Loop's public-access computer center, which is roughly where its designer would have wanted all of them to go. About two hundred were made. All but twenty-five sold within nine or ten months. In April 1977 the price dropped to $475. By October it was off the price list, replaced by something vastly more ambitious, and the buyback began.
Eight Slots
Mike Markkula was thirty-four, semi-retired, rich from Intel stock options, a former product marketing manager who had been an engineer and had cashed out early. He saw in the two Steves a company that could reach the Fortune 500 within five years. In November 1976 he invested $250,000 and brought in the business discipline neither founder possessed. His condition for Wozniak was simple and nearly deal-breaking: he would have to quit Hewlett-Packard.
Wozniak did not want to. He wanted to be an engineer, not a manager, and he believed that joining a startup meant becoming the latter. He relented only when an old friend told him he could join Apple and remain an engineer. He resigned from HP and became Apple's vice president in charge of research and development, a title that suggested management while promising him none. Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977.
He had already begun the Apple II. All the ideas for it, he later said, had come to him while designing the Apple I, but he had refused to implement them because he wanted to finish the first machine on time. Discipline disguised as procrastination. When the second machine arrived, on April 16, 1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire, it was the first personal computer capable of color graphics and the first with BASIC built in. It came in a foam-molded plastic case that Jobs oversaw, with a switching power supply developed by an early Apple engineer named Rod Holt, and with a keyboard in the box. It was a complete appliance.
The color was pure Wozniak. Inspired by a technique Atari had used to simulate color on its early arcade games, he found a way to generate color in the NTSC television system with a chip that cost about a dollar. For PAL, the European standard, color emerged, in his word, by "accident," when a dot happened to fall on a line, and he has said that to this day he does not know how it works. Here is one of the founding documents of personal computing, and one of its inventor's four sole-inventor patents on color signal generation, and part of it runs on a phenomenon the inventor cannot explain. He seems to find this delightful.
Then there were the slots. Jobs argued that the Apple II needed two expansion slots, enough for a printer and a modem, a clean, closed, finished product. Wozniak wanted eight. The argument got hot enough that Wozniak told Jobs to go get himself another computer. Wozniak won. The machine shipped with eight slots.
It is hard to overstate what that decision meant, or how directly it contradicted the aesthetic that would later make Jobs famous. Eight slots meant that other people could extend the computer in ways its designers had not foreseen. It meant cards, peripherals, an entire aftermarket. It was an invitation into the machine. When Markkula grew frustrated with the slowness and unreliability of cassette tape storage, Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy drive, released in 1978, which plugged into one of those slots. When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's VisiCalc arrived in 1979, the first widely adopted spreadsheet, initially available only for the Apple II, it turned a hobbyist's toy into a business tool. Between September 1977 and September 1980, Apple's annual sales rose from $775,000 to $118 million.
In July 2021, long after Apple had become the world's most valuable company partly by making its devices difficult to open, Wozniak recorded a video on the platform Cameo in response to the right-to-repair activist Louis Rossmann. He said the issue had "really affected me emotionally," and he credited Apple's early breakthroughs to the open technology of the 1970s. The eight-slot argument, in other words, never ended. It simply outlived one of the two men who had it.
— Daniel Kottke, Apple employee #12Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person.
Kottke's summary is accurate and a little unfair to both. Jobs did more than market; he saw the business in an object its designer wanted to donate. And Wozniak did more than invent. He held the company's first real product, the one that paid for everything else, as a set of convictions about what users deserved. A machine should have color. A machine should have slots. A machine should be something you could open.
The Man Who Did Not Want to Be Near Money
On December 12, 1980, Apple went public on the Nasdaq, selling 4.6 million shares at $22 each and raising more than $100 million, the largest IPO since Ford's in 1956. By the close of the first day, Apple's market capitalization stood at $1.778 billion, and more than three hundred employees and investors had become millionaires.
Not everyone who had built the company was on that list. Stock options had been distributed unevenly, and some of the earliest employees, the ones who had soldered and tested and packed, received little or nothing. Jobs declined to give them any of his own shares. Wozniak did the opposite. He offered $10 million of his own stock to early Apple employees, a gesture that has since acquired a name, the Woz Plan, and a reputation as one of the most generous moves in the history of the technology industry.
One could read this as guilt, or as public relations, or as naivety. Wozniak has always offered a simpler explanation, which is that he did not trust money and did not want too much of it near him.
— Steve Wozniak, to Fortune, 2017I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category.
There is a straight line from the Breakout bonus to this. The man who said he would have given Jobs the $5,000 if only Jobs had asked was, seven years later, giving away millions to people who hadn't asked at all. In the 2016 AMA he offered advice to a team of young founders that he attributed to Russell Simmons: "Operate from a place of needing nothing. Needing nothing attracts everything." Then he added his own gloss. "One of the things you should do is separate yourself off from the money."
The separation became formal in 1985, when he sold most of his Apple stock. And yet he never quite left. Wozniak has never removed himself from Apple's employee list. He has represented the company at events and in interviews for four decades on a stipend that one 2006 estimate put at $120,000 a year and that he himself, in 2020, described as "about $50 a week." In 2018 he posted a short essay on his website with the title "I Never Left Apple." He is also a shareholder.
This is the arithmetic of a man who wanted the belonging and not the wealth. He kept the badge. He sold the equity. When Jobs was alive, Wozniak said, Jobs always made sure he had a badge that would get him into any building at Apple. "I didn't use it much," he said, "but I can go there. The only trouble is I'll get mobbed."
The badge motif recurs in stranger forms. In 1979, to spend more time with his first wife, Alice, who belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star, he was initiated as a Freemason at Charity Lodge No. 362 in Campbell. After their divorce was filed, he never went back. But, he noted, "I did contribute enough for a lifetime membership." The pattern is almost fussy in its consistency: he pays for permanent admission and then does not attend.
The Reset Switch
On February 7, 1981, two months after the IPO, Wozniak took off from the Sky Park Airport in Scotts Valley, in the mountains between Silicon Valley and the Pacific, in a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC he was not qualified to fly. With him were his fiancée, Candice Clark, a slalom canoeist; her brother Jack; and Jack's girlfriend, Janet Valleau. The plane lifted off too early, stalled in the climb, bounced down the runway, broke through two fences, and crashed into an embankment. The National Transportation Safety Board would cite premature liftoff and pilot inexperience as probable causes.
All four were hurt. Wozniak suffered severe injuries to his face and head and lost a tooth. The worst injury was invisible. For five weeks afterward he had anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. He did not remember the crash. In the hospital he did not remember his name. After his release he did things he would later have no record of doing. He has said that what brought his memory back was playing Apple II games, which means the machine he built had to teach him how to be himself again.
The journalist Michael S. Malone, in his history of Apple, described what emerged:
— Michael S. Malone, Infinite LoopComing out of the semi-coma had been like flipping a reset switch in Woz's brain. It was as if in his thirty-year old body he had regained the mind he'd had at eighteen before all the computer madness had begun.
Wozniak's own account is less dramatic and more telling. When he came out of the amnesia, he realized that the Macintosh team, which he has called his favorite and most creative group at Apple and on which he had worked alongside Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface specialist who conceived the machine, would be fine without him. "So I called up Steve Jobs," he recalled, "and told him 'Macintosh team's in great shape, I'm gonna go back to college and get my degree.'" He had one year left. If he waited another, he believed, it would be too late ever to go back. He later said, in 2013, that "Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn't there."
It is one of the most consequential absences in the history of the industry, and he describes it as a phone call about college.
He re-enrolled at Berkeley, to finish the degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences he had started in 1971. Because his name was now famous, he enrolled under an alias: Rocky Raccoon Clark. Clark, as it happened, was the surname of the woman he married that June. Rocky Raccoon was a Beatles song. The name is printed on his Berkeley diploma. He finished in 1986 and officially received the degree in 1987, which means that the diploma of one of the most important computer engineers of the century is made out to a cartoon.
While he was at Berkeley he also did the most un-Wozniak thing imaginable, or perhaps the most Wozniak thing. With the concert promoter Bill Graham he founded a company called Unuson, short for "unite us in song," and threw two enormous events in May 1982 and 1983 called the US Festivals, "US" pronounced like the pronoun. They were meant to celebrate new technology and became a hybrid of tech exposition and rock festival: music, computers, television, people. He lost several million dollars on the first one. He said that unless the second turned a profit, he would quit rock festivals and go back to designing computers. Later in 1983, he went back to Apple.
Kicking the Dirt in the Parking Lot
He returned asking for almost nothing: the role of an engineer and a kind of morale presence, a founder on the floor. He came back to a company that had changed its mind about what mattered.
The Apple III, released in 1980 as the Apple II's successor, had been a failure, discontinued in 1984. Wozniak's diagnosis was blunt: it "had 100 percent hardware failures," and the primary reason was that it had been designed by Apple's marketing department rather than by engineers. The Lisa, introduced in 1983, was expensive. The Macintosh, which arrived in January 1984 with its graphical interface and mouse, was Jobs's project and Jobs's cause, and by the mid-1980s Apple's leadership, Jobs included, treated the Apple II line and its people with something between neglect and contempt.
The Apple II was paying for all of it. In early 1985, Apple II products accounted for about 85 percent of the company's sales. The machine Wozniak built in 1977 was carrying the company Jobs was building in 1984. And yet when the Macintosh was introduced, the Apple II division was not invited, except for Wozniak himself. He was seen outside, kicking the dirt in the parking lot. At the January 1985 annual meeting, neither the Apple II division nor its employees were mentioned.
His own later judgment of the original Macintosh was withering. In a 2013 interview he said the Mac "failed" under Jobs and only succeeded after Jobs left. He called it "weak" and "lousy," built by "cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there," and he credited its eventual success to people like John Sculley who "worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away." One hears in those words not only an engineer's contempt for an underpowered machine but the resentment of the man in the parking lot, the man whose computer paid the rent and did not get a seat.
In early 1985 he left again and sold most of his stock. The press reported that he was leaving over disagreements with management, and quoted him saying the company had "been going in the wrong direction for the last five years." He later objected to that portrayal. He said he left because he was excited about a new startup and wanted to recapture the fun of building something new. Both accounts are probably true. It is possible to be driven out and to leave for joy in the same week.
That same year, he and Jobs received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan, the country's highest honor for technological achievement. That same year, Jobs was pushed out of Apple. That same year, Wozniak handed him the framed Zaltair brochure. The prank that had waited eight years came due in the year both founders walked out the door, and it is hard not to see the gift as a kind of settlement, a disclosure made at the only moment when disclosure could no longer cost anyone anything.
The Apple II outlived both of their tenures by a long way. A semi-portable Apple IIc arrived in 1984. The 16-bit Apple IIGS, with some input from Wozniak, arrived in 1986, a limited edition of its case molded with his signature. The Apple IIe was not discontinued until November 15, 1993, and a card that let Macintoshes run Apple II software was produced until May 1995. His machine was on sale for eighteen years. The company had spent part of 1977 destroying his first computer to be rid of it. It spent the late 1980s living off his second.
Helping Everyday People Find Everyday Things
The new startup was CL 9, and its product, the CORE, released in 1987, was the first programmable universal remote control. It was a humble object, a device for the living room, and in that sense a return to the Apple I's original ambition: plug into the television, make ordinary life a little more controllable. He explained the move in terms that sound almost like a dating profile. "I love startups," he said. "I love just a group of two or three or five people talking about an idea and going out and making it a reality."
Then, for a while, he disappeared into the thing he had said since youth that he wanted to do second: teach elementary school. He did it for eight years, by his account, in public schools, teaching computer classes to children from fifth through ninth grade, and to teachers, sometimes seven days a week. He did not allow press. Unuson, the festival company, stayed alive to fund additional teachers and equipment. "What I taught," he said, "was less important than motivating students to learn. Nothing can stop them in that case."
In 1990 he helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing some of its initial funding and serving on its first board. The same year he backed an initiative to place computers in schools in the former Soviet Union. He became the founding sponsor of San Jose's Tech Museum, the Silicon Valley Ballet, and the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. The city later named a street for him. The museum's address is 180 Woz Way.
The ventures that followed were a scatter plot of enthusiasm. In 2001 he founded Wheels of Zeus, a company whose initials spelled WOZ, to build wireless GPS technology that would, in its mission statement, "help everyday people find everyday things much more easily." In his own description, it was meant to be a tiny, cheap device, "like $30 in the grocery store," with a battery that lasted a year, which you could drop into a glove compartment or backpack or attach to a dog, and which would tell you where it was. It closed in 2006. "I failed," he said. "I failed on technology grounds of cost, size, and the amount of power usage." Then: "I swear to god, I just keep thinking all the time about the technology advances that would have to be done to make that device possible."
Asked in 2016 what invention he wished he had designed, he described the same device. Among the products in Apple's current catalog is a small, inexpensive tracker called AirTag. He never mentions this in the sources I have read. I find it impossible not to.
The rest of the list is long and uneven. He sat on the board of Danger, Inc., the maker of the Hip Top, and of a telecom startup called Ripcord Networks, alongside former Apple executives Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock. In 2006 he co-founded Acquicor Technology, a holding company for buying and developing technology firms. From 2009 through 2014 he was chief scientist at Fusion-io, a flash storage company, and then at Primary Data, founded by some of its alumni. In 2015, alongside Stan Lee, he announced Silicon Valley Comic Con. In October 2017 he founded Woz U, an online tech education service, licensed as a school in Arizona the following year. At the end of 2020 came Efforce, a marketplace for funding green projects through a cryptocurrency token called WOZX. In 2021 he and Alex Fielding, his Wheels of Zeus co-founder, started Privateer Space to track orbital debris; it released its first space traffic software on March 1, 2022.
And alongside the ventures, the persona, which by the 2000s had become a genre of its own. He co-wrote The Official Computer Freaks Joke Book in 1998. He dated the comedian Kathy Griffin, who called him "the biggest techno-nerd in the Universe" on television in 2008. In 2009 he competed on season eight of Dancing with the Stars with Karina Smirnoff, received ten combined judges' points out of thirty, the lowest score of the night, and survived anyway, whereupon he posted online that the vote count must have been faked, then retracted and apologized after the method was explained to him. He danced on with a pulled hamstring and a fractured foot and was eliminated on March 31 after an Argentine tango that scored twelve. The following year, on The Big Bang Theory, a character tried to explain to a waitress who he was. She said she already knew him from Dancing with the Stars.
This is, depending on your temperament, either a tragedy of misplaced genius or the most rational life imaginable. He had built the machine that launched the industry. He had nothing to prove. He played Segway polo with a team called the Silicon Valley Aftershocks. He married Janet Hill at a Segway polo match on August 8, 2008, at 8:08 p.m., "of course," as he put it. Repeating digits.
He changed his mind about artificial intelligence three times in two years, in public. In March 2015 he agreed that the future was "scary and very bad for people." By June 2015 he had decided that superintelligent machines would keep humans like pets, and reported that he had begun feeding his dog filet steak and chicken every night, "because 'do unto others.'" In 2016 he announced he no longer worried, because computers would never match human intuition. In 2023 he signed the open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. The inconsistency is not a flaw in his thinking so much as its signature. He has always been willing to be wrong in public about things he finds interesting, and unwilling to be dishonest about them.
He lives in Los Gatos, near where Jobs once worked at Atari. He has prosopagnosia, face blindness, which means that one of the most recognizable men in Silicon Valley struggles to recognize faces. He applied for Australian citizenship in 2012 and said he would like to live in Melbourne someday. In 2017 he became a Polish citizen and visited his father's ancestral hometown, the father who had explained every component and never the work. In November 2023 he suffered a minor stroke while preparing to speak at a conference in Mexico City. The next month, in Belgrade, he accepted Serbian citizenship through a discretionary program the political opposition denounced as election-season promotion, and said: "I'm a Serb who lives in America and that's how I want to be." In 2024 he sued YouTube over scam videos using his likeness to push a Bitcoin fraud, and a San Jose appeals court let the case go forward. The man who once called the Vatican pretending to be Henry Kissinger had become the man whose identity other people were borrowing to steal.
He collects citizenships and names the way he once collected pranks, without apparent strategy, as if belonging were another system he enjoys finding the open door into.
On May 30, 2015, an elderly woman dropped off boxes of electronics at a recycling center in Milpitas, just north of San Jose. The boxes had come from her garage. Her husband had died. Among the old equipment was an original Apple I. The recycler sold it for $200,000. The company's practice, when a donated item turns out to be valuable, is to give half of the proceeds to the original owner. Wozniak was drawn into the search to find her. She left no name, and she has not been identified. Somewhere in the valley there is a woman who once gave away one of the first personal computers without knowing what it was worth, who is owed $100,000 for it, and who, as far as anyone has reported, has never come back to ask.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows are principles drawn from Wozniak's decisions, not his aphorisms. Some of them run against the usual founder mythology, which tends to celebrate the partner who captured value rather than the one who created it and let it go. Read together, they describe a way of building that optimizes for the quality of the object and the integrity of the builder, sometimes at real cost to the builder's share of the outcome. Operators should read them with both halves in view: what worked, and what it cost.
The Wozniak Playbook
- 1.Design at the constraint, not around it.
- 2.Build for the room before the market.
- 3.Pair with your opposite, then audit the split.
- 4.Treat the prank as a prototype of belief.
- 5.Leave the slots open.
- 6.Count your ignorance as an asset while it lasts.
- 7.Let the first customer rewrite the product.
- 8.Distribute the upside before anyone asks.
- 9.Refuse the promotion that ends your craft.
- 10.Know when the team is fine without you.
- 11.Keep the badge, sell the equity.
- 12.Never become the only person who can answer the question.
Principle 1
Design at the constraint, not around it
Wozniak's most important technical decisions were made under scarcity he chose not to escape. Cream Soda had twenty donated chips. The Breakout prototype became famous for losing fifty. The Apple I waited, on paper, until the $25 6502 made it affordable, rather than compromising the design to fit a $175 processor he could not buy. The Apple I's clock was set at exactly two-sevenths of the NTSC color carrier so that one signal could serve two purposes, and the Apple II produced color with a chip costing about a dollar.
Scarcity forced him to understand the entire system, because in a design with no spare parts every component has to justify itself against every other. This is why he could later answer every support question about the Apple I, and it is why the designs were elegant enough to be cheap. The point is not frugality for its own sake. The constraint is a thinking tool: it keeps you from solving problems by adding things.
The risk is equally real. Designs this tight become illegible to anyone but their author, which is how Apple ended up buying back its own product.
Tactic: Before your next build, set a hard parts budget (headcount, dependencies, features) below what you think you need, and make every addition argue its way past it.
Principle 2
Build for the room before the market
Wozniak built the Apple I largely to impress the members of the Homebrew Computer Club. He built the Apple I and Apple II, in one retrospective's phrase, because he wanted to use them and they did not exist. His first impulse was to give the schematics away to that room of peers. The market was an afterthought, supplied by someone else.
This sounds like a recipe for hobbyism, and in most hands it is. But a room of demanding peers is a better early filter than a market survey, because peers judge the thing itself, not its positioning. The Apple I drew a crowd at Homebrew because its easy video output solved a problem every person in that room had. The crowd was the signal, and Paul Terrell was standing in it.
The limit of the principle is that a room does not pay. Wozniak needed Jobs precisely because he could not see the market inside the room.
Tactic: Identify the ten people whose technical respect you most want, build the first version to earn it, and only then ask whether anyone outside that room will pay.
Principle 3
Pair with your opposite, then audit the split
The Wozniak–Jobs partnership is the canonical builder–seller pairing, and it worked because neither man could do the other's job. It also contained, from its first transaction, an asymmetry of information that one partner exploited and the other did not discover for a decade.
⚖
The Two Steves, by Division of Labor
Each early project split the same way: one partner built, the other captured value.
| Project | Wozniak | Jobs |
|---|---|---|
| Blue box (1971) | Designed and built the device | Sold about 200 at $150 each |
| Breakout (1973–74) | Cut 50 chips in four days | Collected a $5,000 bonus; reported $700 or $750 |
| Apple I (1976) | Designed the computer; wanted to give schematics away | Proposed the company; won the Byte Shop order and Cramer credit |
| Apple II (1977) | Circuitry, color, BASIC; insisted on eight slots | Oversaw the case; argued for two slots |
| IPO (1980) | Offered $10M of his own stock to early employees | Declined to share his own shares |
Wozniak's response to learning the truth about Breakout, that he would have given Jobs the money if asked, is admirable and also dangerous. It is the reaction of someone who values the relationship over the ledger, and partnerships between builders and sellers routinely punish exactly that disposition. The lesson is not to be less generous. It is to make generosity a choice rather than a consequence of not knowing.
Tactic: In any builder–seller partnership, write the economics down and share the underlying numbers from the first deal, so that any later generosity is voluntary rather than unwitting.
Principle 4
Treat the prank as a prototype of belief
The blue box and the Zaltair were jokes that required serious engineering. The blue box had to work well enough to route a call to the Vatican. The Zaltair required fake trademarks, a fake shipping label, a fake executive quote hiding an acrostic to misdirect suspicion, and advance intelligence about who would attend the show. It fooled Jobs, who compared his own product favorably against a computer that did not exist.
A good prank is a controlled test of what an audience will believe and why. It forces the prankster to model the target's assumptions precisely, which is the same skill required to design a product people instantly understand, or to find the flaw in a system its designers thought was sealed. Wozniak's explanation of the phone network's weakness, that its engineers never imagined anyone building tone generators, is an analysis of other people's blind spots. So is a good product.
The ethical edge matters too. The same instinct that built the blue box led him to destroy code he feared could become a virus. Knowing where the doors are brings a duty about which ones to open.
Tactic: Once a quarter, try to fool your own team with a plausible fake: a spec, a competitor announcement, a customer email. Study which details made it believable.
Principle 5
Leave the slots open
The eight-slot argument is the most consequential product decision in Wozniak's career, and it cut against the closed, finished aesthetic his partner favored. Eight slots let the Disk II exist, let an aftermarket of cards grow, and made the Apple II a platform rather than an appliance. The machine stayed on sale until 1993, and its revenue carried Apple through the Macintosh's slow start.
Openness does something closed design cannot: it recruits other people's imagination into your product's future. Wozniak made the same point about platforms decades later, discussing Amazon's Echo: when other developers write for your platform, "basically they're advertising your company as much as you are." His 2021 support for right to repair, crediting Apple's early breakthroughs to the open technology of the 1970s, is the same argument restated against the company he co-founded.
Openness has costs: support complexity, less control over the experience, room for others to capture value. Jobs's two slots were not stupid. They were a different bet.
Tactic: For every product decision that closes off extension, ask what one additional "slot" (an API, an export, a documented interface) would cost, and default to building it unless the cost is prohibitive.
Principle 6
Count your ignorance as an asset while it lasts
In 2010 Wozniak explained his best work with two counterintuitive advantages: "I had no money [and] I had had no training." No money meant the constraint of Principle 1. No training meant he did not know which approaches were supposed to be impossible, so he tried them. The Apple II's PAL color works by an accident he still cannot explain, which is roughly what happens when someone without credentials is allowed to keep going.
He applies the idea to hiring. Companies, he argued in 2016, overlook the tinkerer who never went to college but has built many things and can "run into their own little garage or laboratory quickly and whip something out," because their job requirements screen for degrees. His own diploma, earned after he had already changed the industry, is made out to Rocky Raccoon Clark.
The asset depreciates. Ignorance is an advantage only during the period when you are learning faster than the people who were trained. Wozniak's later ventures, launched into mature markets, found fewer open doors.
Tactic: When staffing a new-market project, include at least one builder with a strong record of shipped projects and no formal credentials in the domain, and give them authority to try the "wrong" approach first.
Principle 7
Let the first customer rewrite the product
Apple's first plan was to sell bare circuit boards to hobbyists. Paul Terrell refused. He wanted fifty fully assembled units at $500 each or nothing. Apple complied, and in complying it became a different kind of company, one that shipped finished goods. The Apple II went further, with a case, a keyboard, and a power supply. The trajectory toward the complete appliance began with one customer saying no to the original offer.
Jobs's financing move deserves equal attention: he used Terrell's purchase order as collateral to get parts from Cramer Electronics on net-30 terms, funding production from the customer's commitment rather than from capital. The customer both redefined the product and paid for it.
Wozniak did not make these moves; he let them be made. Part of the playbook for a builder is recognizing that the first real customer's objections are specifications.
Tactic: Treat your first paying customer's conditions as a product brief. If they insist on a different form factor or scope, price the change and ship it rather than defending the original plan.
Principle 8
Distribute the upside before anyone asks
At Apple's IPO, some early employees had received few or no options. Wozniak offered $10 million of his own stock to them. Jobs declined to do the same. The gesture cost Wozniak a fortune on paper and, by every account, gained him something he valued more: a reputation that has outlasted his tenure by forty years and a set of relationships that never curdled.
The principle is not simply "be generous." It is a governance insight. Unequal distribution of upside among the people who did the work creates grievances that compound. Wozniak saw a fairness problem the company's formal structure had not solved and solved it with his own balance sheet. He also said, repeatedly, that he did not want to be in the "more than you could ever need" category, which made the decision easier for him than it would be for most.
Operators who cannot or will not give away their own equity can still take the underlying lesson: fix the allocation before it becomes a story people tell about you.
Tactic: Before any liquidity event, list every early contributor and what they will receive, and close any glaring gaps, from the company pool if possible and from your own if necessary.
Principle 9
Refuse the promotion that ends your craft
Wozniak nearly did not join Apple full time, because Markkula's condition, leaving HP, seemed to mean becoming a manager. He agreed only after a friend assured him he could stay an engineer. He took a vice president's title and did an engineer's work. When he returned in 1983, he asked for no more than an engineer's role. When he left for good, he said he missed "the fun of the early days" and loved small teams of "two or three or five people."
Most organizations reward their best builders by removing them from building. Wozniak refused that trade throughout his career, and it cost him influence. He was not in the room when Apple's strategy tilted toward the Macintosh and away from his Apple II division. The Apple III, which he blamed on design by the marketing department, is what happens when the engineers are not steering.
The principle has a sharp corollary: if you refuse management, you must accept that others will make decisions about your work. Wozniak accepted it, and then he ended up kicking the dirt in the parking lot.
Tactic: Build a senior technical track with authority equal to the management track, and if you are the builder, name explicitly which decisions you are handing to others by declining to manage.
Principle 10
Know when the team is fine without you
After the crash, Wozniak concluded the Macintosh team would be fine without him and went back to college. After returning, he concluded that "as other talented engineers joined the growing company, he no longer believed he was needed there," and left again. Both exits were chosen, not forced, though the second came amid real alienation.
⏱
Two Exits, Three Returns
Wozniak left Apple twice and never formally departed.
1976
Leaves HP only after being assured he can remain an engineer at Apple.
1981
Plane crash on February 7; five weeks of amnesia. Tells Jobs the Mac team is "in great shape" and returns to Berkeley.
1982
Loses several million dollars on the first US Festival.
1983
Returns to Apple as an engineer.
1985
Apple II is about 85% of sales but ignored at the annual meeting. Leaves to found CL 9; sells most stock; stays on the employee list.
2018
Publishes "I Never Left Apple."
The capacity to see that a team no longer needs you is rare among founders, most of whom confuse their presence with the company's survival. Wozniak's self-assessment was honest and ego-free. It was also, arguably, too early. Jobs took over the Macintosh, and the Mac Wozniak later called "lousy" was what emerged. Leaving a team that is fine without you is a gift to the team and a surrender of your say in the product.
Tactic: Every year, write down what would change if you left your team tomorrow. If the answer is "nothing important," either take on the hardest open problem or plan a deliberate handoff.
Principle 11
Keep the badge, sell the equity
Wozniak sold most of his Apple stock in 1985. He never left the employee list. He accepts a stipend he describes as about $50 a week, speaks for the company, and has said simply, "I am Apple." Jobs made sure he had a badge that opened every building. He rarely used it.
This separates two things most founders fuse: financial interest and identity. By disposing of most of the equity, Wozniak removed the conflicts that come with a large stake: pressure to cheerlead, fear of dilution, fights over control. By keeping the affiliation, he retained the relationships, the access, and the moral standing to criticize, whether about the original Mac, the $1,100 Apple Watch, or right to repair. He could say uncomfortable things precisely because he had so little to gain.
The pattern shows up elsewhere in his life, like the lifetime Masonic membership he paid for and never used. It is a way of belonging on your own terms.
Tactic: When you exit a company you care about, negotiate a lasting, low-cost formal tie (an advisory title, an alumni role) separate from your financial position, so your voice outlives your stake.
Principle 12
Never become the only person who can answer the question
The opening scene is also the warning. Apple bought back and destroyed Apple I boards because Wozniak was the only person who could answer most support questions. His designs were so tight and so personal that they could not be transferred. The elegance that made them brilliant also made them fragile as business assets.
His later ventures show the other side of that dependence. Wheels of Zeus failed on cost, size, and power, problems of underlying technology no single designer could solve. The strength of the lone genius, one mind holding the whole system, is the weakness of an organization that needs the system to survive the genius's departure, amnesia, or boredom. Wozniak's life is full of such moments: a crash, a return to college, a rock festival, a remote control, an elementary school classroom.
The builder's responsibility, then, is to document, teach, and pass on the understanding. He spent eight years teaching fifth graders and has said that motivation matters more than material. The same principle applies inside a company.
Tactic: For every system you alone understand, schedule a teardown session within 30 days in which you walk a colleague through it until they can answer the next support question without you.
◎
After Apple: A Venture Map
Wozniak's post-1985 projects, categorized by outcome as reported in the sources.
| Venture | Years | What it tried | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Festivals (Unuson) | 1982–83 | Technology plus rock festival | Lost millions |
| CL 9 | 1985–87 | First programmable universal remote (CORE) | Shipped |
| Electronic Frontier Foundation | 1990 | Digital civil liberties | Founding funder |
| Wheels of Zeus | 2001–06 | Cheap GPS locator for everyday things | Closed |
| Fusion-io / Primary Data | 2009–14+ | Flash and data-center storage | Chief scientist |
| Woz U | 2017– | Online tech education | Licensed in Arizona |
| Privateer Space | 2021– | Space-debris tracking | Software released 2022 |
For the long version in his own voice, told in short vignettes and written in part to correct the record about his relationship with Jobs and Apple, see iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Steve Wozniak, 2010Everything I did at Apple that was an A+ job and that took us places, I had two things in my favor... I had no money [and] I had had no training.
— Steve Wozniak, Reddit AMA, March 16, 2016I fought being changed by Apple's success. I never sought wealth or power, and in fact evaded it... I never needed something like Apple to be happy.
— Steve Wozniak, Reddit AMA, March 16, 2016When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you'd have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!
— Steve Wozniak, Reddit AMA, March 16, 2016Certainly in my early design days, I sometimes tackled problems that I didn't know if it was possible to solve, but when I'd get there I'd try to look for a solution, and somehow I always found it. Magic was pouring out of me, back in those days.
— Steve Wozniak, Reddit AMA, March 16, 2016We let Microsoft have all that growth, because we believed in doing the right things. Would you ever look back and say you regretted it or it was an obstacle? No.
Maxims
- Design with fewer parts. Every component you remove is one more thing you truly understand about the parts that remain.
- Wait on paper. When the enabling technology is too expensive, finish the design anyway and be ready the day the price falls.
- Build for the room. Earn the respect of the ten sharpest peers you know before you ask strangers for money.
- Leave slots open. A product others can extend will outlive a product that is merely finished.
- Make generosity a choice. Share the numbers with your partners so that giving money away is something you decide, not something done to you.
- Distribute before you're asked. Fix unfair allocations among early contributors before they harden into grievance.
- A good prank is a test of belief. Model exactly what your audience assumes, whether you are fooling them or serving them.
- Stay a builder if you want to. But know which decisions you give away when you refuse to manage.
- Keep the badge, sell the equity. Belonging and ownership are different assets; you can hold one without the other.
- Don't be the only one who knows. A system that lives in one head will someday be bought back and destroyed.
