Steve Jobs has revealed a little more about the development of the iPad, disclosing that it actually originated before the iPhone

Steve Jobs has revealed a little more about the development of the iPad, disclosing that it actually originated before the iPhone, but was shelved because a smartphone seemed more important for the company. It's been known for some time that the iPhone had tablet origins, but this is the first time that Jobs has been so explicit about the details.

Jobs said, at the D8 conference: "I had this idea about having a glass display, a multi-touch display you could type on. I asked our people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, 'my god, we can build a phone with this' and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone."

The Apple CEO also talked in detail about other topics. About Flash and Adobe, he said: "We didn't start off to have a war with Flash. We made a technical decision. But it wasn't until the iPad that Adobe raised a stink about it. Apple doesn't have the resources others have, and we have to choose which horses to ride. We try to ride those that are on the way up. If you choose wisely, you save yourself an enormous amount of work.

"We have the courage of our convictions. We're going to take the heat because we want to make the best products in the world for our customers. If we succeed they'll buy them, and if we don't they won't. So far they're liking the iPad...we're selling one every three seconds."

On the thorny issue of the high suicide rate at supplier Foxconn's factories in China, he said: "We're all over this. We do one of the best jobs in any industry of understanding suppliers' working conditions. Foxconn is not a sweatshop, it's a factory. 13 suicides out of 400,000 workers this year is less than the U.S. rate of 11 per 100,000, but it's still troubling. We're trying to understand things right now and we have people over there."

He spoke about journalism, and revealed himself to not be a big fan of bloggers: "The foundation of a free society is free press, and some of the newspapers are in real trouble. I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. I'm all for anything that can help newspapers with new ways of expressing themselves and getting paid. We need editorial oversight now more than ever."

Lastly, he talked about TV and its future, admitting that Apple TV has been a failure. He said: "Subsidised set-top boxes have squashed innovation because no one wants to pay for separate boxes...ask TiVo, Roku, us, Google in a few months. The set-top box needs to be torn up and redesigned to get people things they way they want them. And there's no go-to-market strategy for that. With the iPhone, and now the iPad, we could partner with carriers, but television is very balkanized...everything is local."

By: Nate Lanxon; www.wired.co.uk

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