[drewcrawford]

Good for him. In other news, Steve Jobs is often full of shit.

  There are some customers which we chose not to serve. 
  We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a
   piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.
   - 2008

  We didn't think we'd do well in the cellphone business...
  We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA. - 2003

  There are no plans to make a tablet...It turns out people
  want keyboards. - 2003

  I'm not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny
  little screen. - 2003

[aeontech]

Well, first of all, in 2008 there _was_ no way to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk. Not with currently available technology. I'm sure if they could build iPad 5 years earlier at the same price, they would have; the technology wasn't there. Second of all, even Jobs is allowed to change his mind. Calling someone full of shit because 7 years has passed, with technology evolving correspondingly (do you remember the resolution of tiny screens in 2003? I do; cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most; he was right, at that resolution, the market wanting to see movies in that quality is worthless) is a bit harsh, no?

[drewcrawford]

I've thought about this for the last hour or so, and after thinking about it, I think arguing about the hardware is a red herring.

Suppose the hardware wasn't there in 2008 (which I don't think is strictly true, but OK). Are you really saying that Steve Jobs, with all his secret meetings with Samsung and random manufacturers, isn't aware that it will be available soon?

To put it another way, if the hardware is hard, wouldn't it have taken Apple quite some time to build the stuff? Wouldn't they be working on the iPad, say, two years out, when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?

But I think even that argument in a sense is a red herring. The real issue is "can Jobs change his mind?" Of course he can. But he's notoriously cryptic about what Apple's working on. It's not like he's out talking to industry analysts and is making off-the-cuff comments about Apple's strategy. His statements are calculated and controlled. In fact, I would argue that he is more often "wrong" or "misleading" about new products than he is "accurate", because lots (by percentage) of his forward-looking statements turn out to be inaccurate, at least according to the plain meaning of them. To say that he is changing his mind is to imply that he's really inept his job: figuring out what to build.

But I think even that's not the central issue. Let's say Jobs is just a really whimsical guy, who doesn't know he's working on an iPad until it slaps him in the face on launch day. So all of the quoted statements are just him running his mouth and he really has no product vision years out.

Wouldn't that imply, then, that today Jobs has no idea whether he'll be making a Mac app store or not? So his statement has no real information content?

tl;dr It doesn't matter whether the hardware is hard or what his intent is--to mislead or if he simply doesn't know he's going to make a product. His track record shows that claiming he's not going to do something is a good indicator that he'll do it a few years later.

[GHFigs]

The real issue is that your thesis is flimsy and hinges on selective quoting and ignorance of context. Here is but one example:

when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?

He wasn't. Here is the original transcript from which your first quote was pulled. It is not about tablets, and only by implication is it even about the idea of an "Apple netbook", the prevalent rumor of the day.

Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein

And then you had also mentioned the price umbrella statement and you said look, certainly to be successful on iPhone, we don’t want to create a price umbrella. I think in response to another question, you also talked about extraordinary feature functionality in terms of your Mac products. Do you have the same philosophy around Mac as you do with iPhone, that you have to be careful not to create an umbrella in each? So I guess the simple question is should we continue to see more affordable price points across the Mac product family and across iPhone going forward?

Steven P. Jobs

Well, I think what we want to do is deliver a lot, an increasing level of value to these customers. There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve and there’s a lot of them. And we’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect us to stick with that winning strategy and continuing to try to add more and more value to those products in those customer bases we choose to serve. Does that make sense to you?

Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein

Yes, it does. I mean, I guess, if I could follow-up, you did in this case add more value in terms of feature functionality with your notebook by actually lowering the price, so you retained the features but lowered the price. Certainly in terms of the new notebooks, you retained the price and added more features.

Steven P. Jobs

Correct.

Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein

Can we expect you to continue to attract more customers by doing both, both adding more features at the same price and lowering price and retaining the same features?

Steven P. Jobs

Well, we like to attract new customers but you will just have to wait and see.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/100980-apple-f4q08-qtr-end-9...

[blasdel]

The original iPhoneOS device prototypes had 8-10 inch screens, were wifi-only, and named "SafariPad". Their work on capacitive multi-touch goes back to their 2005 acquisition of FingerWorks.

They started working on the iPad two years before they released the iPhone :)

[aeontech]

Well, change my statement from "no way to make" to "no way to have made, and released by that point in 2008". yes, of course it took them years to build the iPad. I wasn't saying that they weren't working on it at that point.

My point was that of course they've been working on it, but it was not possible to have completed it and released it in 2008. If it had been, some other company would have done it; so far though, both with phones and with tablet computers, Apple hardware (at least in the US, not talking about Japan) seems to be right on the edge of what is possible - all the modern touch-screen phones [droid, pre, nexus, motorola, etc] started coming out after the iPhone release; same as we will now see with all the new tablets.

Of course one could argue that the other manufacturers just weren't sure of the market, and only rushed in to fill in the gaps after Apple has proven that there is a demand for that kind of hardware, but I don't think that's realistic - if it was technically feasible for HP or Microsoft to release a kick-ass tablet before Apple, I'm sure they would've jumped at the chance. They hadn't.

As to changing his mind - that was referring to his statements from 2003, and I am saying that in that time his statements were reasonable. Just because 7 years passed doesn't mean that he has to stick by them.

Anyway, this is getting too long. Just thought your statements were strangely harsh.

[pyre]

Dear Steve Jobs,

Are you going to be Open-Sourcing the iPhoneOS...

[drewcrawford]

> Well, first of all, in 2008 there _was_ no way to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk.

In the very tautological sense that it wasn't "possible" until Apple did it, yes. In the sense that we've made some great discovery which has somehow encheapened the silicon, no. It's hard to do because design is hard, not because the tech wasn't there (although there have certainly been tech improvements).

> cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most

The iPhone just about doubles the pixels for (on many devices) approximately the same screen area. Is it better? Yes. Is it revolutionary? Hardly. And anyway, Jobs' purported objection was not to the resolution but to the physical size.

[CamperBob]

Remember how badly touchscreens sucked before the advent of capacitive multitouch. Until it became practical to build tablet-sized iPhone screens, it simply was not practical to build a decent tablet, period.