Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak falls ill while in Mexico

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and an Apple-1 Manual

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was admitted to hospital in Mexico City after fainting when he was due to speak at the World Business Forum (WBF) event there. He was taken to hospital at 3pm, Wednesday local time.

Update: While Wozniak spent time in hospital, he has now returned home to recover. He has since confirmed he suffered a real but minor stroke, but is feeling OK now.

He fell ill before the conference

While reports as to what took place differ, it is thought he went to hospital after feeling strange before delivering the speech. He was hospitalized, potentially due to a stroke. He  remains in hospital in a stable condition and receiving treatment.

He suffered a health problem shortly before he was scheduled to arrive at the event for his talk, CBS reports. “At this moment I understand that he is stable,” the source said

The 73-year old scientist and tech entrepreneur, Wozniak, “Woz”, co-founded Apple with his friend, Steve Jobs in the latter’s parental garage in 1976. He famously designed the revolutionary Apple I and Apple II computers, which established the brand, before leaving Apple in 1985, following a plane crash.

Who is Steve Wozniak?

He’s an important person in the Apple lexicon and beyond. To get some sense of this, it is worth noting that Steve Wozniak’s handwritten schematics and programming instructions for a prototype of the Apple II home computer sold for over $1.3 million at an auction in 2020.

Concerning those notes, he wrote, “At the time, I favored using a purple felt tip pen for writing, so it’s interesting to see these notes decades on… The prototype was hand-wired while I was still an engineer at Hewlett-Packard’s Advanced Product Division, where I was involved in the design of hand-held calculators.”

Wozniak last spoke at a World Business Forum event in 2015.

During that presentation he reprised his work at Apple and stressed the vital importance of working together with others to make great ideas happen. He also discussed some of his early recollections of fellow Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs.

Steve on Steve

“Steve Jobs was a real hippy, he would walk around barefoot and eat out of seed bags,” he said.

“It was what I called Steve Jobs Zero before Apple started,” he said. “Everyone talks about Steve Jobs One where he was a tyrant at Apple and pushing people too hard and moving too fast and unable to have successful products and then Steve Jobs Two when he came back mature and making all the products that changed our lives so much that to this day and really seeing the vision of how people wanted to live. But I saw Steve Jobs Zero and we had a lot of fun.”

At that time, Woz predicted that autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, and AI would be the biggest future technology change agents to come.

Keeping it human

Later, in 2020, he stressed the importance of the human when it comes to product design, saying, “I feel products that succeed the best are ones that feel more like a human, something I want to use as a human, that has a human way in which it addresses me so that I get involved in its user interface.”

More recently, Woz has been taking a stance against unconstrained deployment of AI.

“AI is so intelligent it’s open to the bad players, the ones that want to trick you about who they are,” he said. While he encourages regulation of the sector, he’s not terribly optimistic it will be effective. “I think the forces that drive for money usually win out, which is sort of sad,” he said.

I just wanted to say get well soon, Woz.

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