Success Quote by Steve Wozniak

Wozniak’s complaint lands with the weary clarity of someone who built machines in an era when “works” was a crisp, testable claim, not a marketing mood. “It’s just not right” sounds almost childlike, but that’s the point: he’s invoking a basic moral expectation about technology. Tools are supposed to be faithful. When they aren’t, it isn’t merely inconvenient; it feels like a breach of the social contract between maker and user.

The line carries an engineer’s frustration at modern complexity. As products metastasize into ecosystems - cloud dependencies, subscriptions, opaque updates, “smart” features that break dumb necessities - failure stops being a bug and becomes a business model. Things don’t work “when they should” because the conditions of “should” keep shifting: you’re offline, you didn’t accept the new terms, a server hiccupped, an API changed, a battery is “optimized.” Wozniak is mourning the loss of determinism, the simple cause-and-effect that once made technology feel empowering instead of slippery.

Then there’s the bleak second sentence: “I don’t think that will change for a long time.” It’s resignation, but not complacency. He’s hinting that the incentives are misaligned: speed beats robustness, novelty beats maintainability, and companies externalize the cost of fragility onto users. Coming from a co-founder of Apple - a company synonymous with polished user experience - it reads less like cranky nostalgia and more like an insider’s warning: even the best-intentioned design ethos can’t fully outrun an industry built on perpetual churn.