Whether it’s rocket car launches, the reveal of the most gaudy phones you’ve ever seen, or a fingerprint-scanning smart fridge debut, Dreame Next was full of surprises — but the most exciting for me was easily the appearance of Steve Wozniak. It turns out he’s among the few people who adore the iPhone Air.
Starting with his thoughts on the latest Apple phones, Wozniak mentioned also loving his iPhone 17 Pro Max — though he calls the orange color model the Trump phone, given it shares the US president’s complexion — but for him, as he waved the iPhone Air he pulled from his jacket pocket to the crowd, the improbably slim device wins out.
Because “it invokes an emotion” with its unique aesthetics that feel infused with human passion.
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For Wozniak, this human element is what matters most: “Human beings are more important than the technology.”
And the only way for a company to focus on this human element over all else, in Wozniak’s mind, is if engineers — the people who possess the know-how and passion to conjure designs that people want to use, and to love — are leading the charge at the highest levels.
While he didn’t directly mention Apple’s current situation beyond the iPhone Air endorsement, I couldn’t help but feel his constant references to the importance of engineers in leadership positions was an endorsement of the incoming Apple CEO, John Ternus.
An instrumental figure in Apple’s hardware for the past couple of decades, even heading up its hardware engineering division, Ternus could bring the engineer’s ability to “lead design with their hearts” that Wozniak lauded.
“It doesn’t have a heart”
As you might expect, the Apple co-founder was therefore less than ecstatic about AI, calling his relationship with the tech “a complicated one.”
“Every time computer technology increases it allows the human user to do more than they did before,” he discussed, “It can give me some good ideas, but I do not like the mistakes it makes because it’s too easy to believe the fake stuff.”
AI talks with such confidence that its errors are sometimes easy to ignore, and it also lacks the human flair that only a real emotional person can deliver — “AI can do valuable things, but it doesn’t have a heart.”
Wozniak admitted that AGI — artificial general intelligence that’s as smart as a human — could theoretically have that heart and emotion, but as he put it: “I don’t believe we’ll hit AGI.”
He explained that when he went back to college to finally get a degree after dropping out a decade earlier we majored in psychology. He worked with people attempting to model the human brain and saw how they struggled to understand even small sections of it. “Engineers worked out the only way to build a human brain takes nine months” — a line the hosts didn’t immediately clock was a gag.
In case he’s wrong about AGI, and the technology overthrows us as the dominant force on the planet and takes us on as pets, Wozniak also jokingly said he’s started to feed his dogs fillet steaks — “That’s how I’d want to be treated,” he said.
The death of PCs? Not likely
Looking ahead to what is next, if it isn’t AGI, Steve Wozniak admitted that it’s impossible to be certain, but he expects the next decade to hold more of the same — but better.
That means better phones, better computers, better tech, but not one product cannibalizing another — pushing back on the Dreame Next host’s ponderings that smartphones will finally replace PCs, saying, “I don’t really believe that.”
“Look at cars, once we hit a good plateau it can kinda stay the same for a very long time,” he said. Wozniak added that phones and PCs have plateaued in their respective niches, and he doesn’t expect one to start cannibalizing the other, especially because phones get better, so do PCs at an equal rate.
That doesn’t mean we should get complacent, though. “You’ve got to believe you can improve the technology of the day,” that’s how Apple got started and keeps growing, “Look at what you have got today. How can you make it better? Improve it, improve it, keep taking steps towards the eventual great future.”
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hamish.hector@futurenet.com (Hamish Hector)
