Steve Wozniak: I Never Said Apple Should Make an Android Phone

aNewDomain.net — When my colleague Brian Burgess sent me an email this morning with a link to a Wired article asserting that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak thought Apple should make an Android phone, it sounded funny to me.

It sounded wrong. So I called Steve Wozniak, with whom I penned his biography iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Doing It. Steve emphatically told me that the press had the story “wrong.”

In his email to me, Steve said, “They got it quite wrong for their own reasons … I’m used to things like this, (where the media turns) ‘could’ into ‘should.’ But the idea caught a lot of attention. It was just (my) independent idea … I’m sure others have said it before but I get more attention …”

“I was asked some general question as to Blackberry,” Steve said, adding, “I said, as I have before, that I felt Blackberry’s best (plan) two years ago would have been to make an Android phone.”

“I went into how the world seems to be Apple lovers and Apple non-lovers,” Steve said in the email to me, explaining that “I did say Apple ‘could’ make an Android phone. But I (said) total business decisions would be in the hands of knowledgeable Apple execs — not me.”

In addition, says Steve, “I questioned how much this would compete with the iPhone business.”

“My answer was brief and more thrown out like art, to mention a rare and dramatic idea to get people to (start thinking).” His comment, according to Steve, was more intended as “a form of comedy. I felt it was an interesting thing to say.”

Now that makes sense.

Update: Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook calls Android tablets “crappy.” To that, Steve Wozniak on my Google + stream with this:

“I have heard that and I agree. I have not bought one,” Wozniak said on Monday in response to my Google + share of Tim Cook’s comments. “I would not say that Android phones are crappy or stretched out iPhones, though.

But “one reason that Android tablets are crappy might be because Apple doesn’t make one!” Wozniak said.

Ouch.

For aNewDomain.net, I’m Gina Smith.

Gina Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s memoir, iWoz Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Doing It (W.W. Norton, 2005/2007/2012). With John C. Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle, she is the editorial director at aNewDomain.net. Email her at gina@aNewDomain.net, check out her Google + stream here or follow her @ginasmith888.