Apple Co-Founder, Steve Wozniak (‘Woz’), has slammed Apple’s latest flagship smartphone, the iPhone X, while affirming that digital giants such as Google and Facebook are raking in massive profits, at the expense of consumers.
In an interview with The Australian, Woz declares that Apple’s tenth-anniversary smartphone does not live up to his standards, noting faults in Face ID:
“It works fine, but it’s not what I would want”
“I think what I would want is Touch ID on the back. I’d want that more than anything. Face ID slows down my Apple Pay, and it fails enough times I have to keep typing the password”
“I have friends who actually turned off Face ID and turned passwords on to make their phone simple to use”.
Woz even revealed he didn’t want an iPhone X, but was sent one by Apple:
“I wasn’t going to get the iPhone X, but Tim Cook’s office heard I wasn’t going to get it so they sent me one, and I bit the bullet”.
Following the ACCC’s recent inquiry into the impact of digital media giants, Woz offered his confirmation, affirming that consumers are being taken advantage, as Amazon, Google and Facebook continue to amass large profits:
“If you look at Google, Facebook and Amazon, we’re really being taken advantage of”
“We’re the weak guy and they’re the big powerful guy exerting their power, continually getting more power and wealth over us”
“I oppose that thinking, I like the idea of it being distributed among the people, like blockchain is doing”.
Despite his criticism of the iPhone X, Woz claims that Apple’s treatment of its customers is different than the other tech giants:
“Of the unicorns, Apple is the one that makes its money off of good products”
“It’s not out of knowing everything about your life so we can target advertising to you. Apple protects your privacy, and your security. Apple’s number one.”
Steve Wozniak is known for founding Californian-based Apple with Steve Jobs in the 1970s.
