iWoz: A book review

I finished reading iWoz – the long awaited memoirs of Apple founder Steve Wozniak – on a plane on the way over to San Francisco. Somewhat fitting since the whole story takes place in the 100 square miles where I am sitting at the moment.

In fact, if I was here on Monday, I’d have been able to pop along to Chamber of Commerce and see him. From his busy book-pushing schedule it appears he’s in New York at the moment. That schedule doesn’t list him appearing in my home town of Oxford in a few weeks though, where I hope to grab a quick interview with the man.

Anyway, I finished the book, I was stuck on a plane so I thought I’d write a review of it. Here it is:

iWoz book review

There’s something slightly unnerving about finishing iWoz, the long-anticipated memoir of Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and for many the ultimate symbol of the geek-come-good.

You’ve just gone through 300 pages of personal narrative about this remarkable man’s life, from his early childhood, through formulative teenage years (complete with a back drop of Vietnam and a father who works on secret research for the US government), the birth of the personal computer – in which Wozniak’s genius was a driving force – his subsequent hundreds of millions of dollars, a plane crash, ludicrously loss-making rock festivals, and finally a peaceful focus on aiding children, and yet at the end of all this, you can’t help but feel a bit cheated.

Wozniak is a shy, personal and humble man – virtually the antithesis of his famous ex-partner Steve Jobs – and it is for this reason more than any other that it has taken the best part of three decades for him to collaborate on a book about his fascinating life. It’s a story lots of people have wanted to hear and as a result Steve Wozniak was able to tell it on his terms. And those terms were 56 two-hour interviews with tech reporter Gina Smith at two restaurants in California.

Smith took that raw material and decided that she wanted to tell the story in Woz’s own words, as a strolling tale, a long day spent on the porch, over dinner and then by the fireside with Steve Wozniak narrating his own life. The problem is that while Woz comes across as one of the most likeable men you’re ever likely to meet, he is not the best storyteller.

He is too humble to boast…and too kind to dish the dirt

Boasts

He is too humble to boast – although his early childhood boasts at the beginning of the book are oddly irritating – too shy to give insight in his emotional highs and lows, and too kind to dish the dirt on the people who have taken advantage of his nature over the years.

iWoz is a comforting read but it is all the worse for that. Gina Smith clearly enjoyed her subject’s company – in fact it appears that it was only the chemistry between the two that allowed the book to be produced in the first place – and as a result the risk of upsetting him caused her not to pry too deeply into the most intriguing parts of Wozniak’s life. There were plenty of clues that Wozniak was prepared to talk as well, if only he had been prodded.

He talks of his deep sadness at seeing his first marriage fall apart, and of how he did his best to save it – but that is all. You get no sense of what it really felt like and what impact it had on him, a shame considering that the written word is the most effective tool we have to communicate complex emotion. We glide over his second marriage breakdown, despite the fact that his third child was born while they were separated. And you hear almost nothing at all of his third. Humble or not, marriages are the most intense emotional experiences human beings have and Wozniak has had three. It feels untapped.

Crash and burned

Of his horrific plane crash, Wozniak notes almost as a throwaway that his wife (the second) had to have plastic surgery. Soon after he also notes that because he had no memory at all of the event, he was spared the psychological impact of having to get over the fact he had been in a plane crash. It is a glimmer of what impact that crash had on his marriage and you sense Woz is trying to talk it through. But without being coaxed, he is allowed to slip back into his shell.

The marriage Wozniak is most famous for, of course, is that with his childhood friend Steve Jobs

The marriage Wozniak is most famous for, of course, is that with his childhood friend Steve Jobs – the enigmatic, brilliant but also deeply troubled and controlling man that started Apple with Wozniak. Acres of print has been given to these two men’s interaction. How Jobs pushed Wozniak’s extraordinary computer designs, cajoled him into starting Apple, how the two’s shared passion and confidence saw some long-haired geeks take on the might of IBM and change the world forever by proving the concept of a personal computer. But also how their relationship fell apart as Jobs’ ego took over and Wozniak insisted on remaining just an engineer.

Arguments

Wozniak merely skirts over some of infamous arguments between the two men. When, for example, Jobs got Wozniak to do his work for him and create an entirely new computer game for Atari in just four days. Woz barely slept, saved Jobs’ bacon by allowing him to come good on his groundless boasts, and yet Jobs lied to him, paying him what his claimed was half of the $700 he received for the job. In actual fact, Jobs had been paid several thousand and conned his oldest friend and the man who built the game for him from scratch. “I was hurt,” Wozniak says, “I still don’t really understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another. But, you know, people are different… I wish him well.”

It’s all very well, and admirable, that Wozniak doesn’t bear a grudge but Smith failed by not immediately jumping in and asking 100 different questions, rather than allow Woz to pass over such treachery so easily. Could he ever trust Jobs again? Did he check up on Jobs from that point? What was the impact of that on their relationship?

Wozniak is similarly opaque about the fact that when Apple went public, hardly any of the staff that had worked so hard for the company were given shares. Wozniak ended up giving up huge tranches of his own shares – worth millions – in order to balance things up to his mind. But even that act of honourable charity had to be put through the corporate lawyer. How did Wozniak feel about that? We’re not entirely sure. Even when Jobs used Apple’s muscle to actively damage Wozniak’s new company that he set up to produce universal remote controls, Wozniak is the picture of calm as he retells it. There is no way that having his old friend purposefully damage a company that posed no threat whatsoever to Apple didn’t hurt Wozniak, and he implies as much in his retelling, but the issue is never pushed.

Distance learning

With Wozniak as narrator he has been allowed to keep his distance from the reader, as no doubt he would like, but it often proves frustrating. The decision to run with only Woz’s words also causes some irritating repetition but – most significantly – represents a lost opportunity to provide outside commentary. Pithy anecdotes would not only have livened up the book, they would have also presented the opportunity to give Wozniak’s genius the praise it deserves, rather than rely on his half-embarrassed admissions.

His designs… almost single-handedly revolutionised how we see and use computers

It should not be forgotten that this was the man that designed and built not only the first computer that would allow letters to appear on a screen (before it was just lights on a panel) but also colour and advanced graphics. His designs, and crucially the tight connection between hardware and software – particularly with the Apple II – almost single-handedly revolutionised how we see and use computers.

If this modesty is the book’s failing, there is still plenty to recommend in it however. When he recalls his countless pranks you will find yourself laughing out loud. His pride in having California’s first dial-a-joke phoneline, and the precise detailing of the fun he had manipulating students with a homemade TV jammer, are worth the price of the book in themselves.

His explanation of how he lost his political innocence when the Pentagon Papers revealed the extent to which the US government had lied over the Vietnam War, is moving and pulls the reader back nearly half a century in just half a page. When Woz opens his heart, he has a wonderful, infectious quality.

Beautiful logic

The same gentle passion comes across when he describes his first love – circuitry. All engineers will immediately recognise the joy that a tight, almost perfect design brings, but Wozniak does a wonderful job of explaining that feeling – the obsessive attention to tiny details that results in a working model – to a wider audience.

Over the course of the book, you start to get under the skin of a man who has retained his calm outlook and almost baffling reasonableness despite having become world famous and staggeringly rich. And if you want the answer to how he’s done it, how he appears so undamaged by the extraordinary events that have befallen him, it comes in a strange call to arms at the end.

Wozniak belatedly recognises what he wants to achieve with the book. He claims he wants to set the record straight on a number of things: he didn’t drop out of college, he designed the Apple I and II by himself, he didn’t quit Apple because he was unhappy, in fact he didn’t quit at all. But he could have achieved all this with a high-profile magazine article that a dozen editors would gladly have given him. No, Wozniak wants to talk to those like him: the clever ones that hate the politics and battles of worlds outside their own minds and their own designs – the future Wozniaks.

And his advice is very simple: work alone, believe in yourself and ignore those that tell you you’re wrong. After all, it worked out alright for Woz.