Steve Jobs speaks Flash, ‘lying S.O.B devs’, sex, and Gizmodocrime

Steve Jobs states that Flash has had its day, work on the iPad began before work on the iPhone, the Gizmodophone may have been “stolen out of [Apple engineer Gray Powell's] bag”, more than one developer is a “son of a bitch liar,” and his sex life is “pretty good.”

These remarks — and many more — came in a wide-ranging interview that kicked off this week’s D: All Things Digital conference in the plush Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Speaking about his dismissal of Flash, Jobs stated that its time had passed, and that HTML5 was the new hotness. Topolsky quoted him as saying: “We select what tech horses to ride, we look for tech that has a future and is headed up. Different pieces of tech go in cycles… they have summer and then they go to the grave.”

Jobs was prickly about the Flash contretemps: “We told Adobe to show us something better, and they never did. It was not until we shipped the iPad that Adobe started to raise a stink about it,” Topolshy reports Jobs said. “They made a huge deal of it — that is why I wrote that letter. I stated enough is enough, we are tired of these guys trashing us.”

But Jobs believes that the acceptance of the iPad is proof that the decision to forego Flash was a good one, as proven by customers’ embrace of the iPad. According to Fried: “If we succeed they will purchase them and if we don’t, they won’t. So far, i have to state that people seem to be liking iPads. We’ve sold one every three seconds since we launched it.”

Jobs waxed metaphorically about how the rise of the iPad heralds the end of the PC era. Topolsky quoted him as saying: “When we were an agrarian nation, all vehicles were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”

Perhaps stung by media teasing about his “magical and revolutionary” tablet, Jobs said, as reported by Fried: “People laugh at me because I describe the iPad as magical. You have a much more direct and intimate relationship with the Internet and media and apps and your content. It’s like some intermediate thing has been removed and stripped away. Like that Claritin commercial where they strip away the film, it’s like that.”

But the iPad had to wait its turn to pull off its magical and revolutionary, uh, revolutionary magic. When asked why Apple released the iPhone before the iPad, Jobs said: “I’ll tell you a secret. I actually started on tablet first”, in the “early 2000s” — an admission that will bring a smile to those who have been reporting for years about secret Apple tablet projects.

The tablet idea was shelved because the phone appeared more promising at the time. But “When we got our wind back and thought we could do something else, we took the tablet back off the shelf.”

With the next-generation iPhone nearly certainly to be announced next Monday, questions inevitably arose about the Gizmodophone. According to Topolsky, Jobs said: “So this is a story that is astonishing — it’s got theft, it’s got buying stolen property, it’s got extortion, I’m sure there is some sex in there … the whole thing is very colorful.” Fried noted that Jobs — without providing any substantiation — added that “there is a debate of whether it was left in a bar or stolen out of [Powell's] bag”.

Jobs was also pressed on the on-going embarrassment that is the unpredictable, time-consuming, and seemingly arbitrary App Store police force. Jobs was having none of it, insisting that 95 per cent of all apps submitted to the App Store were approved withing a week.

When problems in the App Store process become public, Tolpolsky quoted Jobs as saying, they are more often than not the developer’s fault: “We’re doing the ideal we can, we are fixing mistakes. But what happens is — people lie. And then they run to the press and tell people about this oppression, and they get their 15 minutes of fame. We do not run to the press and state ‘this guy is a son of a bitch liar!’ — we do not do that.”

Finally, interviewer Walt Mossberg queried Jobs about Apple’s increasing competition with Google, and asked if Eric Schmidt had called Jobs to inform him about Android. Jobs’s response, according to Fried: “”No, they started competing with us and it got more and more serious.” And when Mossberg then pressed on, asking if Jobs felt “betrayed”, the Apple CEO deflected the question somewhat enigmatically: “My sex life is pretty good these days,” he asked the 63-year-old Mossberg. “How’s yours?” ®

Steve Jobs speaks Flash, ‘lying S.O.B devs’, sex, and Gizmodocrime

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