Would-be dance star Wozniak tangos with Apple chip strategy
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, perhaps best-known to today’s generation for doing the Argentine Tango with world champion Karina Smirnoff on “Dancing with the Stars,” weighed in this weekend on Apple’s apparent foray into chip design.
Wozniak was a calculator chip designer at Hewlett-Packard before he and Steve Jobs founded Apple. He said that designing a chip should only cost a few million dollars. If Apple, like all PC makers, continues to contract the manufacturing, the endeavor shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive.
“I have been pushing for it since we started the company,” Wozniak said in an interview on the sidelines of the National Inventors Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Silicon Valley last Saturday. “It’s a competitive advantage.”
“High-performance, low-power chips are the name of the game now,” he said, adding that Apple might want to create different layouts that would make chips faster or more energy efficient.
“Cell phone chips are sold in high volume,” he said, adding that because Apple is a small customer, it can’t get custom chips from its suppliers.
Although Apple has never said who its iPhone suppliers are, analysts say the company uses chips from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Broadcom Corp, Marvell Technology Inc, CSR Plc, and Infineon Technologies AG.
Apple’s chip plan has reportedly been in the works for at least a year as it acquired PA Semi and hired chip experts from Advanced Micro Devices. Pundits say Apple’s first competitive target is likely the application processor chip supplied by Samsung, which controls advanced features such as multimedia capabilities.
Woz on his new gig, DWTS
If anyone thought Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s new role as chief scientist for the data storage start-up Fusion-io would be ceremonial, think again. In an interview with Reuters, Wozniak said he plans to jump in and get his hands dirty.
“I’d actually like to go down and start evaluating the technology at the lowest level and the chips being made and who’s making them… I really think that technology of the future usually starts way down at the level of what components are made. How can they be made a little bit better? How can they be made in a way that would make the Fusion-io technology even more effective?”
Fusion-io officials said Wozniak grilled Chief Technical Officer David Flynn on technology issues before agreeing to sign on as an adviser to the company last year. The chat with the tech icon was likened jokingly to “a day at the principal’s office.”
Wozniak called the period after closing his Wheels of Zeus startup in 2006 a difficult one, as he overloaded himself, dabbling in different things. “I started saying yes to everything.” However, he added, “I started accepting speaking engagements all over the world and it’s been the greatest part of my life for the past three years.”
However Wozniak was clear that Fusion-io will be his main priority–just as soon as “Dancing with the Stars” wraps up. The TV competition begins on March 9. He said he was working very hard, but cautioned “you don’t get fluent in dancing in three weeks.”
Some other thoughts from the Woz on his reality show debut:
- “I had no idea how this works, I’ve never seen the show on TV … I turned it down for one season and then I thought they forgot about me … and then one friend talked me into it. ‘Steve they need you’ … whenever somebody says I need you, I’ll always give in and say yes.”
- “I sat in front of the producer a few weeks ago and I said ‘I could save you from a horrible mistake.’”
- “I am scared, I am not a dancer but fortunately a lot of other people on the show are not and they learn, they learn enough to get on there.”
- “I’m so happy, I’m competing with myself, I’m trying to do the best I can do … my biggest hope is that I wind up wanting to dance for the rest of my life. That would be the most positive result for me, doesn’t matter how well I do.”
- “There are people out there that are actually going to vote for me or root for me because I sort of represent them in some way.”
The Woz to compete on “Dancing with the Stars”
We tend to think of the typical computer genius as introverted and withdrawn, not given to public displays like, say, dancing on television in front of millions of people. Obviously, Steve Wozniak -– who helped launch the personal computer craze -– is not your average technology geek.
ABC announced Sunday that Wozniak will compete against 12 other celebrities on the new season of “Dancing with the Stars,
Steve Wozniak seems like he would be such a fun guy to hang out with. Same thing with Paul Allen; they’re great but their counterparts–Steve Jobs and Bill Gates simply seem annoying.