TIMES ONLINE: The era of the personal computer is coming to an end and the tablet will take its place, Steve Jobs predicted yesterday.
As Apple’s iPad racked up sales for more than two million since launch two months ago, the company’s chief executive said the transition was inevitable.
In a 90-minute performance on stage at the All Things D Conference near Los Angeles, Mr Jobs trashed Adobe over its Flash technology, spoke of his concern at the spate of suicides at the Foxconn factory in China and deflected questions about his rivalry with Google by talking about his sex life.
Mr Jobs, dressed in his trademark black polo necked top and jeans, said the iPad and other tablet-style computing devices would not completely replace laptops and desktop computers in the “post-PC era” but they would consign them to a smaller niche market.
“The transformation of the PC to new form factors like the tablet is going to make some people uneasy because the PC has taken us a long ways,” he said.
He revealed that he had started working on a tablet long before the iPhone - launched in 2007 - but switched to making a phone when he saw the possibilities of the touchscreen. Handsets are a much bigger market than personal computers. Apple has now sold more than 50 million iPhones worldwide in three years.
Worries that tablet computers were not suitable for word processing and other complex types of content creation such as photo-editing would be solved in time, Mr Jobs said, standing by his description of the iPad as a “magical” device. Tablets provided a more direct and intimate computing experience, he said. Read on and comment >>> Mike Harvey, Rancho Palos Verdes, Los Angeles | Wednesday, June 02, 2010
