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.”
