Wozniak calls for open Apple hardware and software

Ever since Steve Jobs convinced his friend Steve Wozniak in 1976 to sell the Apple I board as a product instead of give it away, Apple has been a company with a closed platform. The original Macintosh had anti-tampering screws, Apple refuses to license its desktop OS, and the iOS platform is famously locked down. After backing off on his promotion of openness in recent years, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is again calling on the company to open up.

While giving a talk in Sydney, Wozniak said that Apple could continue to develop the innovative end-to-end solutions it has been famous for while giving developers more access. Specifically, Woz argued that providing a programming interface on the iPad would allow the creation of great new technologies that currently only exist at the fringes of the jailbreak community.

Steve Jobs was the driving force behind Apple’s integrated approach. He believed that to create an “insanely great” product, you need to control the whole widget. It was only in Steve Jobs’ absence in the early 90s that Apple dabbled in licensing its MacOS software. Perhaps Jobs’ passing in October of last year made it easier for Wozniak to renew his calls for openness.

Wozniak pointed to Apple’s tech rivals Google and Facebook, which run open platforms that give developers plenty of access. Apple makes it difficult to even access data without being completely plugged into its hardware and software ecosystem. While Woz is still an experimenter and engineer at heart, he was careful to clarify his feeling that openness should not be allowed to negatively affect the quality of the product.

So the question is, could Apple open up its hardware and software while still creating the cohesive products that saved the company a decade ago? Even if it’s possible, Steve Jobs might have infused too much of his DNA in the company’s leadership for anyone to risk it.

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