waffle

Steve Jobs at D1 in 2003:

Walt Mossberg:

Are you gonna make a tablet? What do you think about the tablet?

Steve Jobs:

No plans at the current time to make a tablet, no.

Walt Mossberg:

You saw your old friend Bill Gates up here being really enthusiastic about it last night, what do you think about it?

Steve Jobs:

Well, I mean, I think it’s great that they’re trying, but… it turns out that I would characterise it a little bit differently than Bill. Bils characterises it as the device that you would take to meetings and take notes. Well, I see people with notebook computers at every meeting I go to, taking notes. So I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I think it’s about handwriting input versus a keyboard. And… handwriting recognition has been tried over and over again and even when it gets really good — it turns out Apple, believe it or not, after all that pain it went through with the Newton it turns out has now the best handwriting technology in the world now. It’s way better than anything else.

Walt Mossberg:

Really?

Steve Jobs:

Yeah. You know the problem? It doesn’t matter. It’s really slow to write stuff! You know, you could never keep up with your email if you had to write it all out. And so… it turns out that people want a keyboard. I mean, when I started in this business, one of the big challenges was People Couldn’t Type, you know, and one day we realized that death would eventually take care of this.

Walt Mossberg:

[laughter]

Steve Jobs:

And… so… people know how to type now! And they want… if you do email of any volume you’ve gotta have a keyboard. And so if you’ve got a device that’s–

Walt Mossberg:

I don’t know, Bill said it’s really easy to do a handwritten email last night.

Steve Jobs:

I… you know… so… we looked at the tablet…

Walt/Audience:

[laughter]

Steve Jobs:

…and we think it’s gonna fail.

Walt Mossberg:

You think the tablet’s gonna fail.

Steve Jobs:

Yes we do.

Walt Mossberg:

What about the tablet as a reading device? Because my own feeling — I’ve been testing it, I even gave it a great review, but what I said was, and I believe this — its actual strength in a funny way is that it’s a much more natural way to read-

Steve Jobs:

Sure.

Walt Mossberg:

-like a long web article or long Word document or PDF file or something than a clamshell.

Steve Jobs:

It’s really true, if you’ve got a bunch of rich guys who can afford their third computer — you know, they’ve got a desktop, they’ve got a portable and now they’re gonna have one of these to read with… that’s your market!

Walt Mossberg:

Okay.

Steve Jobs:

People accuse us of niche markets! [broad smile]

Walt Mossberg:

[laughter]

Walt Mossberg:

What about a PDA? I mean — I would point out for those that don’t have an iPod that actually they have added — even though it’s designed, hardware and software, as a music player, you can put your calendar and your contacts on your iPod now, and you improved that a little with the new ones. What about a PDA?

Steve Jobs:

Well, you know, my email address is out there and so I get an email every time somebody, you know, goes to the bathroom in Iowa. And I get a lot of emails about that over the years, we’ve got tremendous pressure to do a PDA. We’ve thought about this a lot. And what we decided was that… we believe that for everyone using… for the universe of people using a PDA, 90% of them just want to get the information out. Only 10% want to do major input on this thing. And so if what they really want is a repository for data that they can get out, occasionally putting in a phone number, correcting an address… we believe the cellphones are gonna do that. And we saw that several years ago. We just see the curve of cellphones going like this [hand 35° up], you’re going to have to have a phone in your pocket, so that’s gonna have to be the device that carries this information. And we started working, rather than doing– we didn’t think that we were gonna be successful in the cellphone business because of the carriers. We’re not the greatest to sell to the Fortune 500 and there’s 500 of them, 500 CIOs that are orifices that you have to go through to get to the Fortune 500.

Walt Mossberg:

[laughter]

Steve Jobs:

In the cellphone business, there’s five in this country. So, you know, we don’t like 500, we’d rather run an ad for millions of people to let everybody make up their own mind — you can imagine what we thought about five. And so we decided we might not be successful in that business and so what we’ve done instead is we’ve written, I think, some of the best software in the world to start syncing data stored on your computer onto your cellphone. Anyone who’s used a Palm knows that there are two great revolutions in the Palm. One was the, you know, the focused function and form factor, but the second was the dock, the cradle, that allowed to sync it to your PC, so if you lost your Palm, you didn’t lose your life. You could buy another one, stick it in there, refresh it and off you go. And so we believe that that mode is what cellphones need to get to. That’s the mode we copied for the iPod, as an example. Where your personal computer is your hub, all your data’s safe and secure there, you can enter it on a big screen with a real keyboard, etc, etc, sync it to your phone, you can still make changes on your phone, a little bit painful with that small keyboard, but you can do it on occasion, and yet for 90% of the people plus, they’re gonna be able to get all of the information they want out of that phone. And that’s the direction we see it going.