Wealth & Money Quote by Steve Wozniak

Wozniak’s line is a quiet rebuke to the modern tech script where ambition is measured in valuations. By leading with what his goal “wasn’t,” he frames profit not just as secondary but as slightly vulgar - the thing you have to disclaim before people assume it. Then he lands on “good computers,” a phrase that sounds almost quaint until you remember its implied standard: good for whom, and by what criteria? For Woz, “good” meant elegant engineering, approachable design, and the kind of machine a normal person could actually live with. It’s craftsmanship talk, not investor talk.

The subtext is a split-screen origin story of Silicon Valley. On one side: the tinkerer ethic of the Homebrew Computer Club, where sharing schematics and obsessing over clean circuitry counted as social currency. On the other: the corporate machinery that would soon turn personal computing into an industry of margins, lock-in, and market dominance. Wozniak is staking his identity firmly in the first camp, even though he helped create the second.

Context does a lot of work here. Apple’s early myth needed both Jobs’ salesmanship and Woz’s technical credibility, but the culture tends to reward the pitchman. This quote functions as a corrective, insisting that the revolution wasn’t just branding - it was someone sweating the details so the computer could feel less like a lab instrument and more like a tool. It’s nostalgia, yes, but also a values statement: build something worthy first, and let the money be a byproduct, not the brief.