Apple Cofounder Confesses: He Loves the Google Phone
Steve Wozniak admits he's jumped to Google's ship — Steve Wozniak may have once cut in line to get an iPhone. But now he's moved on to a hotter gadget. — The cofounder of Apple — the company that made him millions — told NBC Bay Area a dirty little secret.
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Wozniak has a track record of saying unflattering things about his own company in public — back in March 2008 he was already finding flaws in Apple's latest offerings while promoting his book. What changes with the NBC Bay Area interview is the direction of the defection: he confirms he has moved his daily phone from the iPhone to a Google device.
The timing matters more than the confession itself. Google launched the Nexus One only days earlier, and analytics firm Flurry estimated just 20,000 first-week units sold — widely read as a soft start for so hyped an entry. An Apple cofounder volunteering as an Android endorser is exactly the kind of earned media a struggling launch needs.
First-order effects
- Google gets a credible, Apple-credentialed endorsement for the Nexus One at the precise moment its first-week sales numbers are being called unimpressive — free counter-messaging against Apple's halo.
- Wozniak becomes a walking news hook for the Android-vs-iPhone narrative; every future device opinion he offers is now quotable ammunition for both camps.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces awkward optics: its own cofounder carrying a rival handset gives critics of the iPhone's closed ecosystem — from app rejections to carrier lock-in — a sympathetic face at the peak of the platform fight.
- Tech press incentive shifts toward mining founder-level dissent for headlines, meaning Wozniak's offhand gadget remarks will keep generating stories that neither company controls.
Third-order effects
- The smartphone war is increasingly fought through individual credibility rather than product specs alone — a founder's personal choice becomes a marketable signal in a two-platform contest.
- If prominent insiders keep crossing lines publicly, brand loyalty around mobile platforms looks more porous than either Apple or Google's marketing implies, pressuring both to compete on openness as well as polish.
The trend: The Apple-Google smartphone rivalry is turning high-profile individual endorsements into a battleground, with founder-level voices carrying outsized weight in each platform's public narrative.