Apple Legend Woz Torches Tesla UI – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 8th March 2025, 01:46 am

I just wrote yesterday about Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak’s presentation at a big tech conference in Barcelona, Spain. He criticized Big Tech taking over our lives too much and tech billionaires becoming too directly political. On the sidelines of the conference, CNBC interviewed Wozniak (Woz) and got more comments from him on Tesla, Elon Musk, and other matters.

Tesla UI

Woz owns several Tesla vehicles, and was an early Model S buyer. While Tesla is known for turning cars into computers on wheels, starting the trend of placing a giant touchscreen in the middle of the dash, and bringing a lot more capabilities to cars via software, many Tesla owners have not liked software and UI (user interface) updates the company has implemented over time. Woz is definitely in that camp. “Every step up, where they changed things in the car, it got worse and worse and worse, and now it is just miserable for user interface,” he said. “Coming from Apple, user interface, the way you deal with technology, is the most important thing in the world to me — and Tesla is the worst in the world at that.” He provides various examples briefly, some of which I’m very familiar with….

Those are some scathing remarks. He just torched Tesla on one of the things it is most famous for and proud of. I wouldn’t say I fully agree, but I did co-own a 2015 Tesla Model S and have owned a 2019 Tesla Model 3 for the past 5½ years, and I can definitely see where he’s coming from. The UI has gotten more and more cluttered, messier. A lot has been added, but it has almost become clutter. Some processes don’t at all work the way I’d prefer them to, and I have to fumble through workarounds on some of them routinely. Finding a feature or setting has never been easy due to the way Tesla organizes and nests them, but it has become very difficult or annoying with some of them. I remember a big Tesla investor and super-bull who explained the value of the company at length better than anyone a decade ago. As software updates started to get annoying, he got more and more irritated with Tesla’s evolution, and especially with Tesla Service’s responses to his concerns and requests. He eventually gave up on them and decided to sell all of his Tesla stock. He saw the company as getting worse, not improving, on key aspects of the owner experience. Woz’s comments on the UI remind me of this early investor’s.

In fact, he also brought up similar complaints on working with Tesla Service on this. “I go down to the Tesla Service Center for 7 years, the Tesla Service Center — ‘Here’s this problem, look at it. Here, I’ll demonstrate it, I’ll make it work. Somebody should pass the word up so Tesla engineers know what to do.’ And he said, ‘Tesla doesn’t talk to us’ — at a Tesla Service Center. And I’m just sick of that company, the support is so ridiculous.”

He went on with other complaints about the UI, including referencing a more recent Tesla Model S or X they have with a steering yoke (rather than steering wheel) and a story his wife had from not signaling a turn because of the lack of a normal turn signal stalk, being pulled over by a cop, and struggling to find how to open the glovebox.

Politics of Bullying

Beyond that, Woz offers some perspective on how Elon Musk got so off-track from the fields he had expertise in and was succeeding in. “Elon Musk, I don’t know what got into his head,” Wozniak added. “You know, sometimes you get so rich at these big companies, and you’re on top — all that goes to your head, and you’re the most credible person in the world and the brightest and you’re going to dictate what others will do.

“Bullying is the best way to think of it. If you’re in school, the bully’s gonna force their way on the little guy. […] I’ve always favored the little guy over the big guy, and I’ve always favored the consumer of a good over the producer.”

It wasn’t entirely clear what he was referring to here, but presumably what Musk has been doing at “DOGE.” I’ve said for years that I saw a notable change in Musk — at least, how he behaved — in late 2018 after Tesla became profitable. Whereas he was “punching up” most of the time before that, trying to break into a guarded, outdated, difficult industries, once he got on top, he started “punching down” — in all kinds of ways. That behavior just seemed to grow and grow.

When asked generally about political matters, Woz also critiqued how Elon Musk and Donald Trump have been dealing with Ukraine’s struggle for survival and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He says they have been bullying and mistreating Ukraine and Zelenskyy. And he was extremely critical of how Republicans in power are not working on solutions to compromise with representatives of the ~50% of voters who voted against Trump. “We’re going to the extreme right, and we’re going absolutism and it’s not a two-way conversation. It’s one-way — ‘we’re powerful, we’ve got the cards.’”

On the DOGE activities, he noted that efforts to improve government efficiency should be done more carefully, “with a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer.”

Tesla Full Self Driving?

Woz also dug in on Tesla’s failures with Full Self Driving. “I’ve spoken on national TV shows about how he lied to us — about driving itself across the country by the end of 2016, and then by [the end of] 2017. And he got money from us, stole money from us, [to] try to upgrade to the one that would do it when they wouldn’t.”

Free Speech?

Woz says that his account on X (formerly Twitter) was blocked two or three months ago, and despite going through the steps to prove he is who he is, he can’t get it unblocked. “Maybe it was because I was on the wrong side of Elon?”

Featured photo by Nichollas Harrison (CC BY-SA 2.0)