I finally got round to watching the TechCrunch TV video interview with Steve Wozniak, where he shares his last conversation with Steve Jobs and also provides some insight into Apple’s future. Woz sometimes gets lambasted by the press, in part due to his seemingly ‘un-Apple’ engineer-focussed worldview. Too often, I’d say he’s misquoted or his words are taken out of context. In the linked video, he showcases that he has one thing that could be hugely beneficial to Apple: empathy with Steve Jobs.

Interestingly, Woz says the last conversation he had with Jobs was about him maybe coming back to Apple, because Woz understood the technical things. Woz’s response:

Knowing who’s telling the truth and what people really want and how they think and what products they like and not like—that is worth so much more.

But his understanding of these things backed by his technological knowledge is a reason why Woz could make for an interesting sounding board at Apple. He worries that with Jobs gone, Apple could lack a single person who would keep things simple and beautiful, eventually going the way of Sony. And he points at a couple of stumbles in the recent iPhone 4S event, where Apple spent some time talking about dual-core processors and the ‘split antennae’. Woz argued Jobs would typically simplify or remove such references, instead focusing solely on what’s really important to the device’s users. His main point about the technological aspects:

They matter to engineers.

But not to anyone else.

To be fair to Apple, the previous event played out with the senior teams knowledge about Jobs’s health and that he was dying. Coupled with this also being the team’s first event without Jobs’s involvement, it would be crazy to not cut Apple a little slack. It takes time to get things right, not least when you’ve had such a strong presenter and figure leading your keynotes for many years. But the next keynote, whenever that happens (best guess: the next iPad, some time in 2012) will show whether there’s cause for concern in terms of Apple’s razor-sharp focus and direction. If the event concentrates on what you can do with the device, that will be encouraging: if it has a Retina display and it talks of its beauty; if the device is simply ‘faster’ and ‘more powerful’. But if there’s too much talk of technology, of processors, of RAM, and of the other things that really don’t matter to anyone not of a technical bent, perhaps it’d be time to let Woz have a once-over of those presentations before they happen, so the engineer can remove all the engineer stuff.

Update: TechRadar reports that Al Gore says Jobs was “against leaving a legacy at the company of trying to second-guess what he would have done”, citing issues at Disney where people would ask what Walt Disney would have done. His argument: “Follow your own voice.” That’s fair enough, and I certainly don’t disagree that people at Apple should follow their own mind and not be slavish to the past, and they should certainly never be nostalgic. However, there’s nothing wrong with sanity-checking whatever you’re doing against how Jobs would have presented it. Getting excited about new technologies or concepts that Jobs didn’t care about (gaming, say) could be a fine thing; but banging on about complex technology in a keynote because that’s your passion and your voice—that’s when you should be asking what Steve would have done and react accordingly.