Success Quote by Steve Wozniak

There’s a brash, almost accidental grandiosity in Wozniak’s line: the idea that a handful of engineers in a garage weren’t just building products, they were quietly drafting the etiquette of modern life. “Setting the tone” is doing a lot of work here. It’s not “inventing” or “disrupting” - words that belong to pitch decks - but something subtler: defining what feels normal. The click of a mouse, the friendliness of an interface, the expectation that machines should meet humans halfway. Tone is atmosphere, not policy, and Wozniak is claiming authorship over the atmosphere.

The intent reads as both pride and warning. Pride, because early Apple did help reframe computing from institutional machinery to personal companion, a shift that still determines who gets to feel “included” by technology. Warning, because tone is contagious: once you teach the public that tools should be seamless, delightful, and always-on, you also train them to tolerate opacity, dependency, and a constant upgrade treadmill. A tone can be warm; it can also be manipulative.

Context matters: Wozniak is the engineer-idealistic, playful, allergic to corporate posture. Coming from him, the line carries a kind of rueful accountability. He’s not bragging like a CEO announcing market dominance; he’s describing a moral fact of scale. When your design choices become defaults for millions, every shortcut becomes culture, every convenience becomes expectation, and every “small” decision becomes a template the world copies without noticing.