Whether it’s rocket car launches, the unveiling of the flashiest 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 that he is among the few people who love the iPhone Air.
Starting with his thoughts on the latest Apple phones, Wozniak also mentioned loving his iPhone 17 Pro Max – although he calls the orange color model the Trump phone, as 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 impossibly slim device wins.
Because “it evokes a feeling” with its unique aesthetic that feels filled with human passion.
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For Wozniak, this human element is what matters most: “People are more important than the technology.”
And the only way for a company to focus on this human element above all else is, in Wozniak’s mind, if engineers—the people who possess the know-how and passion to conjure up designs that people want to use and love—lead at the highest level.
Although he didn’t directly mention Apple’s current situation beyond the iPhone Air approval, I couldn’t help but feel that his constant references to the importance of engineers in leadership positions was an endorsement of incoming Apple CEO John Ternus.
Ternus, who has been instrumental in Apple’s hardware for the past few decades, even heading its hardware engineering division, could bring the engineer’s ability to “lead design with their hearts,” which Wozniak praised.
“It doesn’t have a heart”
As you might expect, Apple’s co-founder was therefore less than ecstatic about AI, calling his relationship with the technology “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 don’t like the mistakes it makes because it’s too easy to believe the false things.”
AI speaks with such confidence that its flaws are sometimes easy to ignore, and it also lacks the human flair that only a truly emotional person can provide – “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 feel, but as he put it, “I don’t think 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 trying to model the human brain and saw how they struggled to understand even small parts of it. “Engineers figured 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 topples us as the dominant force on the planet and takes us as pets, Wozniak also jokingly said he’s started feeding his dogs fillet steaks — “That’s how I want to be treated,” he said.
The death of PCs? Not likely
Looking ahead to what’s next if it’s not AGI, Steve Wozniak admitted it’s impossible to be sure, but he expects the next decade to hold more of the same — but better.
That means better phones, better computers, better technology, but not one product cannibalizing another – pushing back on the Dreame Next host’s musings that smartphones will finally replace PCs, saying: “I don’t really believe that.”
“Look at cars, once we hit a good plateau, it can 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 as phones get better and so do PCs.
However, this does not mean that we should become complacent. “You have to believe you can improve today’s technology,” that’s how Apple started and continues to grow, “Look at what you have today. How can you make it better? Improve it, improve it, keep taking steps towards the eventual great future.”
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