Steve Wozniak Frustrated with Apple TV, iPhone, MacBook Air

Apple’s co-founder, Steve Wozniak, dubbed as “the only Apple employee free to comment about its products criticially” was in Sydney this morning to deliver the keynote speech at a conference focused on Australian broadband.

During a press Q&A session he opened his heart and vented out his frustrations with iPhone, Apple TV and MacBook Air products.

Wozniak criticized Apple TV’s 24-hour rental limit by saying that his “…life is way too mobile and unpredictable for that. I don’t want to have to pay again to watch the rest the next night.”

Wozniak said he is not looking forward to the introduction of 3G iPhone, because 3G technology is nothing new and it still works “at the lower speeds.” He also thinks that iPhone was “kinda overpriced,” but they “dropped the price too much, too fast.”

“I was in the audience, and half the phones that AT&T sold at that time were all 3G phones.”

Apple has long claimed the decision to support EDGE over 3G is due solely to battery life issues. Woz thinks different:

“I don’t understand why it would be a battery issue. I get as much life on my 3G phones as I do on my non-3G phones. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m not paying close enough attention. But I don’t think that’s it though.”

Surprisingly, Woz thinks MacBook Air is not going to be a hit. As a downside to MacBook air, he doesn’t think it’s beneficial if “…you have to carry around a DVD player with you, a couple of extra dongles to connect to Ethernet and things, and maybe an extra hard disk to carry your music on…”

Steve Wozniak’s life as a world renowned technologist led him - in his own words - to become a sort of a social outsider.

“When you grow up in technology and become a real genius at it, you sort of become a social outsider. … So once you’re a social outsider, technology becomes a kind of refuge. A place to hide… a place to exemplify how you can do it even better.”

Wozniak believes that every home should eventually have broadband fibre-to-the-home connection, so people can watch video in every room simultaneously. “So I think fibre to the home might eventually be necessary in those cases. If you build a useful network today, you can expand it over time - you don’t have to redo the actual infrastructure.”

Wozniak also offered his sympathy to artists and musicians who seem to lose money because some people download their music over the internet for free. “You know, I feel sorry… The recording industry is selling less CDs and it is starting to approach the state that the dotcom industry was in before it blew up in our Silicon Valley area… So that’s already begun. But any new technology has to do that. When cars were invented, we didn’t expect rails to carry as much… or ships.”

Wozniak opened his heart about his relationship with Steve Jobs contending they are “very good friends,” but things do get complicated sometimes.

“He calls me and he says he doesn’t like something that I was reputed to have said… I’m very positive on Apple, but I’ll also point out things that could be better, or aren’t the way I’d like them to be.”