Building something to deliberately look like a bomb, and then placing it in a location to again make it look as much like a bomb as possible is completely different from:

* Making a clock * Telling everyone it is a clock

Woz got told off, Ahmed got interrogated with no parents present, then arrested, walked past his schoolmates in hand cuffs, placed in juvenile detention, suspended (still suspended), finger printed, ...

Woz got "told off"? Did you read the story? He spent a night at the juvenile detention center and very likely endured everything that Ahmed did as well, but the story, as written, doesn't contain any of the details.

He trolls a little smarter these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1TIYxm1vM (TLDW: He makes perforated tearable "notepads" of real $2 bills and spends them conspicuously to prank people. "You can get arrested for them, but not convicted, because you're in the right." He explains how it works in a deliberately misleading but technically honest way, and may have tricked the host on the show. He's probably buying uncut sheets of bills and perforating and gluing them. Includes short mentions of other hijinks. I'm not sure I believe all of them.)

Peter Thiel in Zero to One: "Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school"

Anyone with access to good chemical lab has done so.

Rule of thumb - the deadlier it is, the easier it is to make.

I suppose Ahmed has a bright future.

>He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police.

This kind of belies the idea that this is a new phenomenon.

Except Woz did what he could to make it seem like it was a bomb, then left it in a locker.

Very different from Ahmed's situation.

He built what was intentionally a fake bomb.

Notice: No felony charges. No criminal record.

If Steve Wozniak was 15 today and did the same things he did as a teenager back then he would already have a rap sheet too big to fit in a binder.

The larger topic, that schools and police greatly overreact to misbehavior (whether real, or as in Ahmed's case, imagined) by students, especially boys, is in no way a new phenomenon. It's been going on for decades.