Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak made a surprise visit to a local horse rescue farm on Wednesday morning, and while there he offered praise for — and criticism of — Apple.
Wozniak, the 61-year-old avuncular inventor who built Apple's earliest computers and founded the company with the late Steve Jobs, was in town to visit a horse named Woz — his nickname — in his honor.
The horse, a Belgian crossbreed, was rescued in March by Peaceful Acres Horses Inc. in Pattersonville the day before he was to be sent to a slaughterhouse. Wozniak, an animal lover who said he often speaks to animals and is moved to tears when he watches films in which they suffer, donated money to save Woz.
He said he heard about the horse's fate from John Schieb, who is a friend of the farm's owner. Wozniak met Schieb at a patent office at which Schieb worked in the late 1990s. The two have a mutual interest in animal welfare, and Schieb added Wozniak's name to the Peaceful Acres email list.
The farm, a 156-acre facility in the hills of Pattersonville that saves neglected and malnourished horses, sent out a mass email saying the horse would be killed if money wasn't donated to provide for its care and welfare. Wozniak stepped up, and as a consequence was then invited to visit the horse now known as Woz. Wozniak traveled to Pattersonville on Wednesday morning after a speaking engagement in Buffalo.
Dressed in a black polo shirt, black pants and a pair of rubber, steel-toed boots, Wozniak toured Peaceful Acres for about an hour before he was shuttled to Newark, N.J., for a flight to his Los Gatos, Calif., home.
The man associated more with machines than animals cooed and whispered to his namesake horse for a few minutes when they met. Wozniak said his love of animals was sparked by his first dog, a Siberian husky named Bandit.
After the tete-a-tete, Wozniak briefly spoke about the company he helped found.
Asked about criticism that an Apple conference held on Tuesday offered little excitement and few new developments other than updated MacBook laptops, software upgrades and the construction of a new mapping program, Wozniak said the criticisms are largely unfounded. "People are always going to be disappointed," he said. "I really like the new MacBook."
But he doesn't much like the iPhone 4S Siri voice-recognition application that acts as a personal assistant. Wozniak said he used the program before Apple bought it and found that it became less accurate after the purchase.
"A lot of people say Siri. I say poo-poo," Wozniak said. "I was using it to make reservations long before Apple bought it."
"I would say, 'Siri, what are the five largest lakes in California?' and it would come up, one, two, three, four, five. And I would ask 'What are the prime numbers greater than 87?' and they would come up all in a row. That was pretty incredible," Wozniak said.
He said he told family and friends about Siri and how "This was the future: speaking things in normal ways, feeling like you're talking to a human and how Siri was the greatest program," Wozniak said.
"Then Apple bought Siri," he said. He then paused, lifted his right hand and gave it a big thumbs down.
"'What are the largest lakes in California?' I'd get all these lakefront properties. And I'd say 'What are the prime numbers greater than 87?' And I'd get prime rib," Wozniak said.
"I'm really disappointed, but it's still a market for the future," Wozniak said. "I think voice recognition for all the platforms is going to get better and better and better at putting together complete sentences and phrases. What did a human really mean? Like, if you said 'Five, I mean six.' It will understand a backup, the little faults in our speech that humans understand. It will understand that eventually."
Wozniak also said he is enthusiastic about Apple's new application called Passbook, which can essentially turn a user's iPhone into a digital wallet, storing coupons, store loyalty cards, airport boarding passes and movie tickets.
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