It seems Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak favors "coopetition" and wishes partnerships with Samsung and Google instead of court battles. In an interview with BBC's Click on Saturday, Wozniak dreams of Apple products enjoying the best elements of its top competitors while sharing what it does best.
Wozniak met Steve Jobs in the 1970s and the magical history of the makers of iMac, iPhone, and iPad begun. While the latter often gets the praises, Wozniak was the actual brains that helped push the company to success.
Woz, as the Apple co-founder is fondly called in the tech world, said that companies should explore technology sharing and cross-licensing.
"I wish to God that Apple and Google were partners in the future," said Wozniak during the interview.
"I don't know. If I were there, it would be pretty likely. I'm probably wrong, there's probably an awful lot I don't know about the business concerns and one thing you've got to remember is a company has always got to make money.
"I believe you should have a world where you've got to license something at a fair price. There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don't know if Samsung would stop us. I wish everybody just did a lot of cross-licensing and sharing the good technology, all our products would be better, we'd go further. I do wish they were more compatible," Wozniak clarified.
Wozniak pointed out that Apple's Siri often ends up inferior to its Android counterpart in terms of speech recognition and reasoned that it is due to the latter's access to the search engine of Google.
"Sometimes I say 'Go to Joe's Diner' and [Siri] doesn't know where Joe's Diner is. And very often usually I find out that Android does. That is actually the future of intelligence probably for computers getting smarter and getting artificial intelligence," he said.
The discussion also touched on wearable technology, particularly smartwatches. Wozniak imagines a smartwatch that will have the full capabilities of smartphones.
"We're just at the verge of having products that have foldability and flexibility. For about three or four years I've been talking about organic LED displays that could be theoretically printed on plastic, wrapped and folded," described Wozniak.
He hopes materials scientists will look into developing such materials to make smartwatches more functional, "But think outside of the box. It could be on the inside of your arm and then when you flip your arm up it could actually flip open into your own hand."
