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Comment by rryyan | Hacker News Reader

> Despite his frustrations with gadgetry, Wozniak is still a gearhead. He says he carries five to 10 cell phones around with him at a given time. Sometimes he'll set up half a dozen of them, along with standalone GPS units, on his car's windshield, all navigating him to the same spot.

What?

(I have to say, I respect Woz as an engineer, but this kind of odd behavior reduces his credibility as a popular technology prognosticator for me.)

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It doesn't seem that odd to me.

I can see carrying around multiple phones to test the features and usability against each other.

I can see testing the GPS in multiple phones against one or more dedicated GPS units.

There's many reasons why you would use multiple GPS. I'm sure Woz was being Woz and testing which works the best by flat out competing them against each other and his own knowledge.

Plus I remember having a GPS tell me I was at my destination in downtown Manchester when we were actually 5km from the street address. I had another tell me to perform a U-turn on a one way street when I missed a turn that didn't exist.

I don't see it as odd, I'm sure at once one time he was carrying 10 cell phones to see which ones he actually wanted to keep. IIRC he said he usually keeps an iPhone and a Blackberry on him at all times, which I'd imagine would be his main pair, beyond that he'd probably simply be testing newer phones or different styles to see if they're better.

To be fair, this is probably a one-time story that Woz told and the journalist saw it fit to paint him as a loon.

I have multiple phones on me at any given time. If you want to do side by side comparisons of how the phones "feel," or if you want to try applications that only exist on one phone platform, then you need to do this. eBay is a good resource here, because you can buy phones without contracts at reasonable prices, especially phones that are in the immediate prior generation.

Is it not part of his profession to be more interested in technology than the average person? I don't see much difference between that and a doctor collecting pictures of skin cancer or a poet browsing through a stack of literary journals.

I like to use multiple gps units.

Some lose signal when others don't. Some recommend different or wrong routes. Its handy when one of your gps units is telling you to levitate your car to get onto that raised freeway above you.

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