This was a 5-star for me but likely wouldn’t be for most people. I enjoyed the downright geeky details of his inventions and designs. Some reviewers call him egotistical but I think it’s great for someone to speak about their accomplishments, especially when that person’s contributions have been overlooked and overshadowed.

Woz seems like a genuinely good person who tried to do good things and our society doesn’t reward that unless it comes with aspirations for power.

His naïveté and trust in others was his downfall throughout his life and he learned some hard lessons because of it.

I hope history gives him his due and the incorrect reporting about him and his departure from Apple is corrected.

Steve Wozniak is an engineer by heart and has a very interesting personality you can learn alot from.

Wozniak is exactly who you expect him to be, and it comes across in his writing - which sometimes is more technical than you might want but I eat right up. Guy is profoundly cool and unapologetically lives his life the way he views it. He makes me feel like a sellout in all the best ways.

Wozniak is one of my favorite people, so I'm biased. Yes, the book sounds as if it has been transcribed directly from Steve talking in a slightly rambling way (I've heard him speak and it sounds just like this.) However, he has such an infectious enthusiasm, one can't help but be charmed. I wish I had some elements of his personality. He'd have been just as happy if he'd never left HP. He goes into some technical detail, because he's so interested, but I wish it had been a little more, and I wish he'd put in some technical diagrams to accompany the text. The prose isn't highly polished, but the story and enthusiasm are great.

This is book is very worthwhile to read... but perhaps for not the most obvious reasons. It is not well written. Understanding Steve Wozniak's distrust of people who tell the story of the founding of Apple and get it wrong, I think he decided to write this book himself and not trust anyone who might twist it into something else. He is an engineer, in the truest and best sense, and he is an introvert. These things come out in the book, and make it a much different read perhaps than might be expected. Don't expect emotional misty eyed passages as Woz and Steve Jobs create Apple.... expect the nuts and bolts of things an engineer finds fascinating.

He corrects some wrong information out there about Apple and himself. One correction, he did finish college. It has been reported widely that he dropped out and never got a college degree. That's wrong. Another correction, he designed and built both the Apple I and Apple II computers himself without help. Also, he never quit Apple out of anger or bitterness. He did leave Apple to start another company, but he actually is still an Apple employee.

So read it in the interest of finding out the accurate history, from a man who was there and made it happen.

One of my favorite quotes from the back of the book that made me laugh is one from Guy Kawasaki who wrote "The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries" :
"It is, in a nutshell, the engineer's manifesto. I hope that the so-called 'innovation experts' and MBA's choke when they read it."

Steve Wozniak wrote this book with the help of Gina Smith. The book reads like it was written by a 13 year old. I guess Gina just typed it up and checked it for typos. Many many times SW repeats himself. He adds a lot of little comments again that a 7th grader would say. This is more amazing by the fact he has a 200+ IQ and pretty much single handedly created the personal computer! He has a very structured mind and picked up a lot of his computer creating skills with the help of his father by the time he was a teenager! His father was a brilliant engineer on secret government projects.

Woz does not have much to say about Steve Jobs who together they created Apple. They were friends when Steve Jobs was in High School and Woz was starting college. Steve and Steve were not all that close it seems later on, other they stuck together making millions at the start of the tech boom. Jobs was the marketing management guy and SW was the creator.

Woz never wanted to be a part of the management team and that to me is the reason Apple had the downward spiral for a few years with some bad decisions. Even when Woz kept having some great ideas the new management weren’t listening. He really should of been in charge of company decision making. He knew computers and was always ahead of his time.

Even Jobs got pushed out of his own company by these short sided marketing geniuses. In the 80s they needed what Jobs was creating at a new company and this brought him back to Apple and the rest is history. Woz never totally left Apple but no one was listening to him anymore. He developed the Universal Remote Control (with a new company he started) and just kept creating. He was very generous with his wealth giving a lot to charities and schools. He gave millions of dollars worth of his stock in Apple to other employees! He was still a multimillionaire a few times over.

I learned a lot about the start of computers, and the start of Apple but really wish Gina was a better editor and would of cowritten this way more professionally.

iWoz was a really polar opposite insight into Apple Inc. compared to reading about Steve Jobs and his life. Where Jobs was all about power and money and only the best, Steve Wozniak cared about having fun and people enjoying his product as much as he enjoyed building it. This book really interested me because I had just read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and I really wanted to see the whole beginning and growth of Apple from another side. Steve Wozniak was so compassionate about his work, and he really cared about what he made, and how people would use them. This really was a nice insight into the brain of Woz, and his way of thinking and some of the things he did were really funny and enjoyable to read. I has always just assumed that he was a big nerd and there wasn't really interesting about his life but boy was I wrong. His pranks and humor were so relatable and it really makes you see him in a new light. This was so well written and flowed so well, its really hard to find something I didn't enjoy, I found myself always engaged and interested the whole time. If you love Apple or just tech in general, make sure to check out this book!

- Book Review: "iWoz" by Steve Wozniak -

Delicate, wonderful, inspiring biography.
Review tonight ...

iWoz was a good autobiography of an interesting man. Many comments in other reviews mention the self-centered and/or patronizing sound, but it may not be his intention, and for those who know him, it may not be seen that way. Maybe the editors should have told him how it was coming off to strangers, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. It may be that he possesses genius of a level that crowds out some social conventions, so he doesn't know that explaining things that are very technical, on an elementary level can be off-putting to some who have a little knowledge of computers. It could be worse. Some talk over the heads and readers get lost, when the subject could be quite entertaining.

I enjoyed hearing about the inside of the initial success of Apple. I enjoyed hearing about Steve's (Woz's) life and his passions including, but aside from engineering computers. He WAS a totally different man that the other Steve, and he acknowledges that it took the combination of the two to make Apple what it was, when it started.

I enjoy hearing the story from the source, and Woz set the story straight on a few things. It is worth listening to, even if your education level is high school and above. Most of the information is worth knowing, even if you have to work at not being offended by the delivery.

This is a great book for anybody at least mildly interested in techno-geek stuff, the history of our information age, or if you just like a good autobiography.

I knew previously that Steve Wozniak was part of the force behind building the original Apple PC products. But I actually had no clue that he is all but single-handedly responsible for inventing the world's first Personal Computer. As an I.T. aficionado myself, that story line was inspiring. It's very uplifting for anyone who's got great ideas and wonders whether you're alone swimming upstream.

One of the things I liked a lot was that he went into engineering details about some of the interesting techie stuff he's done. Some of it I could understand (e.g., why network cable is twisted) and some if it was over my head (e.g., the intricacies of laying out a circuit board for the first PC). It was enjoyable either way.

This isn't a high-level novel by any stretch. Simply an accurate account of Steve's fascinating life written in his own words.

Like most of them who had read this book I too felt that the writing was not great but what kept me hooked was the fact that I myself come from an electronics engineering background. The way he does stuff like Sudoku game, VCR, bluebox, building the Apple I and many such projects were really inspiring for the electronics engineer in me. I also felt connected because I could understand the little details about logic, chips, microprocessors , transistors and stuff that he explains and the bits of introverts problems.

I felt he had too much pride while explaining his inventions because there are many others like him who have done great things.Other things about him that were inspiring. Like how he never put money before his happiness was a good life lesson. He ended up having less money than say Steve Jobs or Bill Gates (who were part of the personal computer revolution he started with the design of Apple I and Apple II) he had more fun in doing so. At some point he even taught at elementary schools for about 10 years spending time with kids. He is one of the greatest pranksters I have ever heard of. He seems to pull pranks on people at every possible situations.

Overall I think he deserves more recognition than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates because he single handed designed Apple I and Apple II which started the personal computer revolution.Many people give credit to Jobs for most of the products or designs that Apple came up with but Steve Wozniak and other true engineers are the real heroes behind Apple's success.

Now I want to read the Job's version of the story. How could Job's gain such a good reputation in the Silicon valley/Apple without inventing/designing anything by himself? Pure marketing skills? I hope not...