Apple CEO and Co-founder Steve Jobs appeared at the eighth D: All Things Digital, in an interview Tuesday night. The event is sponsored by “The Wall Street Journal.”
In the almost two-hour, wide-ranged interview, Jobs covered a variety of topics. You can read the entire transcript at http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/, but here are some of the highlights:
° Concerning Flash (and his dislike of it): “Flash has had it’s day, but HTML5 is starting emerge … The video looks better and it works better and you don’t need a plug-in to run it.”
° On the Foxconn suicides: Saying that Apple is extraordinarily diligent and rigorous about vetting its manufacturing partners, Jobs says, “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. They’ve got restaurants and swimming pools … For a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”
° On Apple’s purchase of Siri, which is widely regarded as a search company: “I don’t know if I would describe Siri as a search company. They’re not in the search area .. they’re in the AI area … We’re not going into search.”
° On AT&T: “They’re doing pretty good in some ways and in others they could do better. We meet with them once a quarter. Remember, they deal with way more data traffic than anyone else. And they’re having trouble. But they have the fastest 3G network and they’re improving. I wish they were improving faster … I’m convinced that any other network, had you put the iPhone on it, would have had the same problems.”
° On the history of the iPhone and iPad: “I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it. And six months later, they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got [rubber band] scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone.”
° On the future of the personal computer: “The transformation of the personal computer to new form factors like the tablet is going to make some people uneasy because the personal computer has taken us a long ways. The personal computer is brilliant … and we like to talk about the post-personal computer era, but it’s uncomfortable.”
° Regarding content creation on the iPad — and whether it’s really a good device for the task: “Well, why wouldn’t they be good for content creation? It can’t be that the software isn’t powerful enough, because the software is improving … These devices over time are going to grow to do new things.”