Steve Wozniak at F5 AppWorld: What Engineers — and the Rest of Us — Have Forgotten About Building Things Right

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined F5 CPO Kunal Anand at F5 AppWorld 2026 in Las Vegas for a wide-ranging conversation about engineering philosophy, AI as a collaboration tool, the ethics of technology development, and his lifelong formula for happiness.

Kunal Anand, Chief Product Officer at F5, opened Thursday morning’s keynote by telling the room a personal story. His father brought home an Apple II — it was what the family could afford. And that computer changed everything. It gave him a way to express himself. It set him on the path that eventually led him to where he was standing.

Then he introduced the person who built it.

Steve Wozniak — Woz — spent the next 45 minutes on stage at F5 AppWorld 2026 in Las Vegas doing what he’s always done: thinking out loud, telling stories, and saying things that are more useful than most planned keynote content. He wasn’t there to pitch anything. He was just being himself. And that turned out to be the most grounding hour of the conference.

The Engineer Who Didn’t Know He Was an Engineer

Wozniak fell in love with digital technology at age 10. There were no books about it, no courses, no YouTube tutorials. He wrote letters to companies asking for manuals. He drove onto the Stanford Linear Accelerator campus on Sundays — the smartest people in the world don’t lock their doors, he noted — and read journals in a dark library.

He designed computers over and over, alone in his bedroom, just trying to use fewer parts. Nobody assigned him that goal. He assigned it to himself.

By the time he graduated high school, he had a ham radio license and knew he was going to be an engineer — even though he didn’t yet believe that computers were designed by engineers. He thought they were built in research labs or the military. He was too shy and too far outside the mainstream to know otherwise. So he just kept building, for the joy of it.

That self-directed obsession produced the Apple I and Apple II — computers that put a keyboard and a TV display at the center of personal computing, a configuration that had never been done before. He gave away the Apple I schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. No copyright notice. Public domain. He wanted other engineers to look over his shoulder and see how he’d done it.

Steve Jobs wasn’t even at the club when Wozniak showed it off. He was in Oregon, at a commune. Wozniak brought him down to see it. Jobs said they should start a company. Wozniak said no — he was loyal to Hewlett-Packard and never planned to leave. HP turned him down five times for the personal computer concept. A friend eventually talked him into it with one argument: you can start a company and stay an engineer. You don’t have to run it.

That was the day Apple started.

Understand the System. Then Push It.

Wozniak is famous for pranks, and he used them to make a deeper point about engineering.

His $2 bill stunt has run for 30 years. He orders uncut sheets of real $2 bills from the U.S. government, has them bound into tear-off pads, and pays for things by tearing off bills in front of cashiers. Technically legal — the Secret Service has verified it four times, though they did read him his Miranda rights on one occasion. The point is to find unusual things, things other people wouldn’t think of, and then follow the logic wherever it goes.

The same mindset produced the blue box — a device he and Jobs built early in their partnership that could replicate telephone tones and make free long-distance calls. The engineers at AT&T had built an enormously complex system and assumed nobody would ever reverse-engineer it. Wozniak did. His most memorable blue box moment: calling the Vatican, impersonating Henry Kissinger, and getting close enough that a bishop had already contacted the real Kissinger before the gag was discovered.

The lesson he drew from it wasn’t about breaking rules. It was about curiosity. About understanding a system so thoroughly that you can find what its designers didn’t think to protect. He connected it directly to cybersecurity: the same mindset that lets you find the crack in a phone network is the one you want working on your infrastructure. The question is whether we’re still cultivating that curiosity, or whether academic training and standardized engineering paths are producing people who all read the same textbook and arrive at the same conclusions.

On AI: Collaboration, Not Replacement

Wozniak signed the open letter calling for a moratorium on frontier AI development. He hasn’t walked it back. He said he’d sign it again.

His reasoning wasn’t that AI is bad. It was that responsible development requires thinking carefully as you go, not after the damage is done. He pointed to Aza Raskin — son of Jef Raskin, the Apple designer who pushed the world toward intuitive, human-centered computing — as someone doing that kind of thinking seriously.

On what AI can and can’t do, Wozniak was clear: it makes real errors. It goes off in the wrong direction. It can write code that looks fine and isn’t. His own programmer friends have pointed this out. You need a human to oversee it. A chaperone, he called it.

He described AI as a collaboration tool, not a replacement. Someone using AI well gets more thoughts, more options, more possibilities. But the output still has to go through a human who understands the domain. The alternative — taking an AI answer at face value and passing it on as your own — only works, as he put it, if you’re not that smart.

He’s also worried about deep fakes. He personally knows people who have been defrauded of hundreds of thousands of dollars through AI-generated scams. The technology that makes these possible isn’t going away. What bothers him more broadly is the subscription model that now governs so much of technology — the idea that you can no longer simply buy something and own it, that the company retains control and can change what you bought without your permission. He’d like to see that change.

Why Big Tech Can’t Be More Ethical — Even If It Wants To

Wozniak had a blunt answer to the question of why large technology companies don’t do more good.

CEOs don’t have power, he said. Their boss is the shareholder. And the shareholder only cares about one thing: is the stock up or down? That’s not a character flaw — it’s a structural reality. The incentive system doesn’t reward companies for doing the right thing when it costs money or slows growth. He’s never checked the Apple Stock app. He doesn’t want to spend his life thinking about whether a number is up or down.

The point about truthfulness ran through the whole conversation. His father gave him one rule: always tell the truth. Not because it sounds good, but because it’s what you actually believe, and you can say it the same way every time. He’s promoted it his entire life. It’s the most important thing he knows.

Happiness = Smiles − Frowns

Near the end of the conversation, Kunal Anand asked about Wozniak’s personal formula for happiness. It came from a moment at 18, reading a magazine profile of a powerful executive flying between cities, buying and selling companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Wozniak thought about it for a moment and realized he’d rather be the person laughing about the things he’d done.

His equation: H = S − F. Happiness equals smiles minus frowns.

The smiles side is about creativity, humor, and building things. Wozniak draws a direct line between humor and creativity — both involve finding a different meaning in something familiar, arriving somewhere unexpected through a new path. Anything you make that you’re proud of adds to the total.

The frown side is about arguments, resentments, and things you can’t control. His rule: don’t argue with anyone. Two people can look at the same situation, reason carefully, and reach different conclusions — and both be right from where they’re standing. Getting angry about that wastes something you don’t get back. Take the constructive step. Move on.

He closed with the people he admires most: app developers. Not because of what they build specifically, but because they create entirely new branches of technology and use things that don’t displace something else, but add to the world. That, he said, is where real wealth comes from. Not zero-sum competition, but new things that didn’t exist before.

What the Room Took Away

Kunal Anand thanked Wozniak on behalf of everyone in the room whose career started with an Apple II. It was a genuine moment — not a formality.

What Wozniak brought to a conference full of security engineers, platform architects, and AI practitioners wasn’t nostalgia. It was a reminder that the best engineering has always started with curiosity, not curriculum. With fun, not fear. With a willingness to question the system rather than just operate inside it.

In a week full of announcements about AI agents, post-quantum cryptography, and zero-trust architectures, that might have been the most useful thing anyone said.