Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak tells Future Transport Summit that technology still fails to meet the needs of users

STEVE Wozniak is chilled for the most part but there is one thing that makes him mad — and he had a hand in inventing it.

THE co-founder of Apple has told a room full of tech geeks in Sydney that while he’s pretty Zen about most things in life, his blood boils when the technology he is using fails, particularly if caused by the limitations of The Cloud.

But Steve Wozniak admits that, being the man behind some of the most ubiquitous technology developments on the planet, he only has himself to blame.

Talking at Monday’s NSW Government Future Transport Summit in Sydney, which has a heavy focus on new technologies, Mr Wozniak told the crowd he had also had issues with Siri and continued his drubbing of the Apple Watch, saying the gadget “isn’t compelling”.

Mr Wozniak, almost universally known as “The Woz” developed the first Apple computer in 1976 with the late Steve Jobs. While his home is in California, his son lives in the Sydney seaside suburb of Manly.

Talking at Monday’s summit, he said he had a simple equation for happiness: “H=S-F” or happiness equals smiles minus frowns.

“I decided when I was 20 years old happiness was what life was about, not accomplishments, even.

“Telling jokes all day, if you don’t get mad when your car gets scratched — my brand new car gets scratched, I just say, ‘Cars get scratched.’ I have a really good head for that,” he said.

However, his sunny disposition is tested when it comes to technology.

“The only thing I get upset about is when technology fails. You do something right for a human and the technology doesn’t understand you and you do the wrong thing.”

It was the rise of Cloud computing around the time of the creation of Siri, Apple’s sweetly sounding electronic helper, that gave him one particular cause for consternation.

“Apple had an iPhone at one time and you could speak into it and I could say, ‘Call Janet,’ and it was all in the phone and I could call my wife,” said Mr Wozniak, reminiscing on simpler times.

But then came the iPhone 4S and the advent of the Cloud, where vast amounts of data are stored not within the gadget itself, but in servers far away and accessed wirelessly.

“Then we got to Siri, I had it in my car, and I pushed the button up on the dashboard, and I’d say, ‘Call Janet,’ and it would wait and wait and then it would say, ‘Siri’s not available, you’re not on the internet.’

“And I said, ‘My gosh, why don’t you just build it in like you used to?’” he said.

“I just want the user interface that’ll do a certain thing for me and it crashes. If the human is more important than the technology you put the effort in to make the technology work in human ways.”

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak during a press conference at The Future Transit Summit in Sydney today.

He admitted, however, that technology pioneers like himself were the one’s responsible.

“It’s people like me that created that stuff that doesn’t work right.”

He is nevertheless a fan of Siri when it can connect with the Cloud, previously saying it was “the app that changed my life”.

Four years after the 4S, the company is now on the iPhone 6 series of phones with the smaller screened iPhone SE launched in March.

Mr Wozniak also continued his criticism of the Apple Watch, launched in a blaze of publicity a year ago, which was first aired in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) last month.

Speaking directly to the Sydney crowd, he asked: “How many (of you) have the Apple Watch?” When watch-clad wrists failed to spring up, The Woz said: “Very few compared to how many have iPhones.”

“They’re convenient for certain things as part of your daily activities (but) it’s not a compelling purchase yet.”

Even though he was wearing an Apple Watch, and said he enjoyed it for the Apple Pay function and because you could put boarding passes on it, he said he had actually turned his off because the battery sucked up too much power.

The jury was out on whether the watch was a “failure or success” but it “dispels the rumour some people say, ‘Oh you put the Apple name on it and people just have to buy it.’”

Apple has remained tight-lipped about the product, refusing to disclose how many units have been sold, fuelling rumours it has not been as successful as the iPhone or iPad.

Nonetheless, according to Venture Beat, the company has ranked in at least $1.68 billion in revenue from the smart watch.

The watch woes may not come as too much of a worry for Apple. In January, it reported the largest quarterly profit for any public company in history, pocketing the tidy sum of $18.4 billion.