Steve Jobs appeared on stage at D8 last night for an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Here are some of the many interesting (paraphrased) quotes from his time on stage.
When asked about the Gizmodo prototype story:
You know, when this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got advice from people who said ‘you gotta just let it slide, you shouldn’t go after a journalist just because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I concluded the worst thing that could happen is if we change our core values and let it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.
Regarding the origins of the iPhone and iPad:
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 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 to work on the tablet.
Speaking about the role of PCs moving forward:
PCs are going to be like trucks. There still going to be around, there still going to have a lot of value, but there going to be used by one out of X people.
When asked about the changes to the iPhone SDK agreement that limited the collection of analytics data:
Well we learned this really interesting thing. Some company called Flurry had data on devices that we were using on our campus — new devices. They were getting this info by getting developers to put software in their apps that sent info back to this company! So we went through the roof. It’s violating our privacy policies, and it’s pissing us off! So we said we’re only going to allow analytics that don’t give our device info — only for the purpose of advertising.
Steve Jobs is always an interesting guy to listen to, especially when he is speaking candidly. I think everyone should watch the clips of the interview in All Things Digital’s video section.
