Apple CEO Steve Jobs said on Tuesday night that personal computers running rival Microsoft’s Windows operating system are in a permanent decline and that only a fraction of current users will still rely on them in the future.
In a rare onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference, Mr Jobs compared the fate of the PC to trucks in agrarian America. The dominant vehicle when farming was the way most people earned a living, they were vastly outnumbered by cars when the country became more urbanised.
The same thing will happen with PCs, where “one out of every x” people will continue to use them, he told the Dow Jones event hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in the wide-ranging discussion at a resort outside of Los Angeles. The shift “is going to make us nervous”, speaking of multiple generations used to the machines.
Mr Jobs wasn’t explicit about what would displace the PC, but he implied that the three-year run of Apple’s iPhone and the early success of the iPad tablet were good indications. He said it was easy to foresee the iPad becoming much more useful in creating content than it is today.
In good spirits and energetic for well more than an hour, Mr Jobs also confirmed that he had pushed for a tablet computer like the iPad before the iPhone, when some key elements of the interface came together. He said he delayed the product when it became clear that Apple could sell a mobile phone in a new way, without the telecom carrier overseeing every aspect of the device.
“I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important”, Mr Jobs said. He is expected to unveil a new version of the iPhone next week, but wouldn’t discuss that or other products in the pipeline,
Mr Jobs did say it was “surreal” when Apple passed Microsoft in stock market value last week, though fundamentally “not why you come to the office”.
He said he was upset about the 13 suicides and attempted suicides thus far this year at supplier Foxconn and that Apple was sending outsiders to learn about conditions at the factory complex that employs 400,000 people.
“We’re all over this,” he said, adding that the facility “is not a sweatshop” but a complex with pools, restaurants and movie theatres.
Mr Jobs defended the company’s decision to ban Flash-encoded videos and websites, as well as programs created with Flash, from the iPhone and iPad, saying that the HTML5 standard was growing in popularity and that consumers could always buy rival products instead.
Asked about network congestion and dropped phone calls on Apple’s exclusive US carrier AT&T, Mr Jobs made it clear that the issue was a serious concern for him. He said he had been told by people he trusts that as AT&T works to install new equipment and upgrade its systems, the calling conditions tend to get worse before they get better.
“If you believe that,” he said, “things will be getting a lot better.”
