Jobs at D8 on iPhone origins

>>So, when you built this OS, this multi-touch gestural OS for fingers you didn't do it in a tablet right away you did it in the phone. What was the, I mean, did you consider doing a tablet when you did the iPhone or was it just a natural progression; the iPhone came out it was a big hit? >>I'll actually tell you, it's kind of a secret. >>Okay. >>Okay. >>I actually started on the tablet first. I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multi-touch glass display and I asked our folks could we come up with a multi-touch display that we type on, I could rest my hands on it and actually type on it and about six months later they called me in and showed me this prototype display and I gave it to one of our other really brilliant UI folks and he called me back a few weeks later and he had inertial scrolling working. When I saw the rubber band inertial scrolling and a few of the other things I thought "My God, we can build a phone out of this!" and I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important and we went and took the next several years and did the iPhone and when we got out our wind back and thought we could take on something next, pulled the tablet off the shelf, took everything we learned from the phone and went back to work on the tablet. >>So, where does the tablet go from here? Now, among the many things that people think it's going to do is save journalism. That was, you know, there's a lot of stories about you going to visit the publishers and talking about it being the hope of journalism. Do you consider that a goal of yours or anything that is important to you or is it just that magazines look real pretty on it? >>One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press. Some of these newspapers are the news gathering and editorial organizations are really important. I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now. So, anything that we can do to help the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations find new ways of expression so that they can afford to get paid so they can afford to keep their news gathering and editorial operations in tact I'm all for. What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content and, so, this provides us a potential opportunity to provide them even more value than just a web page and to start to charge a little bit for that. I'm trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charge traditionally for print because they don't have the expenses of printing, they don't have expenses of delivery and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume because I think people are willing to pay for content. >>And when you did your presentation on the iPad you said its like, you know, here's your phone, here's your laptop, here's this third category and if it's not better than a Netbook it's not a value to people, it's not going to succeed and people have to feel like it's not an extra thing to carry. They have to feel like it's enough of the time going to replace enough of the things they do on their laptop not necessarily 100%. Is the tablet going to be eventually replace the laptop do you think? >>PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value but they're going to be used by one out of X people and this transformation is going make some people uneasy. People from the PC world like you and me. It's going to make us uneasy because the PC has taken us a long ways. It's brilliant but, and we like to talk about the post PC era but when it really starts to happen, I think it's uncomfortable for a lot of people and because it's change and a lot of vested interests are going to change and it's going to be different. So, I think that we're embarked on that. Is it the iPad? Who knows. Will it happen next year, five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows but I think we are heading in the right direction. >>Well, you don't really think it's going to happen next year, right? I mean it's a longer process than that, isn't it? >>Sure. >>And what do you imagine...