Gina Smith editor-in-chief of BYTE.com and co-author of  iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (available at the iBook Store) spoke to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak yesterday and according to BYTE the announcement that Jobs was stepping down as Apple CEO made him “happy for Jobs. ”

Feeling a little dazed by the pace of change these days? Perhaps a little wistful for simpler computing times gone by? Then feast your eyes on Wozniak’s Conundrum, a wonderful – and working – steampunk marriage of a 1991 era Macintosh and an 1897 Remington typewriter.

Yesterday, Apple co-founder, occasional Cult of Mac commenter and just all-around huggable bear Steve Wozniak was awarded an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal, and as he has been wont to do quite a bit recently, he used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to talk about super-intelligent robots, futuristic androids and the ever present danger of machines enslaving humans.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek, revealed at the Australian Chambers Business Congress today that he is convinced superior beings will one day rule the world and that we will become “the dogs of the house.”

Yesterday, we reported that Apple had taken the unusual step of both suing and filing-to-dismiss its own lawsuit against the Fei Lam, the teenager who sold Steve Wozniak along with hundreds of others their own white iPhone 4 conversion kits.

That was weird enough. Even weirder? This is the first Fei Lam himself has heard about the case being settled.

It seems Apple’s legal team managed to take some time out of suing Samsung to file a lawsuit against a New York City teenager who made $130,000 selling white iPhone 4 conversion kits before the device was launched.

Everyone’s favorite former Apple co-founder, Woz, gave a speech to Michigan State University grads last week, declaring: “Every time we invent a computer to do something else, it’s doing our work for us, making ourselves less relevant.”

He went on: “How does a computer ever create art, for example, if it can’t sense things that a human understands, like the wind on a beach. Well, our computers have gotten hearing and seeing, they’ve got feeling, touch sensitive; they can sense motion, just like our inner ear. Pretty soon we’re going to have holograms, which are much better than what you call 3D television. We’ve created a new species; no question. We’re creators and, like I said, we’re making ourselves less relevant.”

I, for one, welcome our new more-relevant computer overlords. They can do all the dull stuff to do with managing finances and designed sewage systems, and while we irrelevant humans go to the beach with a good book.

Speaking at a keynote session at Storage Network World in Santa Clara, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was asked how tablet devices had changed the computer industry – his answer was that these devices are for ‘normal’ people – not geeks. Woz told the audience of enterprise storage engineers that:

The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room. It’s for the normal people in the world.

Woz also said that it was also Steve Jobs’ intention to create products that were normal consumer appliances:

I think Steve Jobs had that intention from the day we started Apple, but it was just hard to get there, because we had to go through a lot of steps where you connected to things, and (eventually) computers grew up to where they could do … normal consumer appliance things.

The New York Times‘ Bay Citizen website has published more remarks from Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak on the subject of Mike Daisey’s controversial one man show.

As previously reported, Woz was moved to tears by “The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a monologue about Apple and Foxconn, the company’s largest supplier in Asia that saw a rash of worker suicides last year.

Wozniak says he found the play deeply upsetting. He urges Tim Cook, Apple’s COO and current acting CEO, to go see the one-man show besucase the issues it discusses could hurt Apple financially in the future:

Tim should know about this very soon, so that he knows what’s in more and more people’s heads. The emotions and understanding and moral feelings that Mike brings out are very strong and could be a threat to Apple’s future, even though they are only simmering now.

The Bay Citizen: Apple Co-Founder Responds to ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, was moved to tears by a play about the working conditions of Apple’s factories in China.

Woz went to see “The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” by Mike Daisey on Tuesday night at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The one -man show, which describes the working conditions in the massive factories that make gadgets for Apple, Hewlett-Packard and others, made Wozniak cry.

The Apple cofounder told the New York Times’ Bay Citizen website:

“The shocking things that Mike said which brought me to tears were so because they came as a first-person story,” Wozniak said. “Mike was living the pain of what he was describing as he told it.”

The monologue describes Daisey’s trip to Shenzhen last year, where he met workers at Foxconn’s plant as young as 12 and 13, and heard tales of the long, repetitive work. As many as 17 workers have committed suicide at the Foxconn plant.

Wozniak also said: “I will never be the same after seeing that show.”