back to article Steve Jobs speaks from beyond grave: 'iPads are toys'

Videos starring the late Steve Jobs are now available on iTunes for anyone interested in retracing Apple's super-soaraway decade-long journey from niche player to fondleslab fever. The six hour-long interviews feature the co-founder of the world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas, speaking in full-on hard-man-of-tech …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Steve Evans

    LMAO!

    "world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas"...

    Anna, you need a troll icon! Even as I type this I can hear distant mouths starting to foam.

    1. David Webb

      Re: LMAO!

      With that comment alone I believe I would like to marry Anna.

      1. A Leach

        Re: LMAO!

        A certain Chris Williams is responsible for interjecting that comment. Please direct marriage proposals his way

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: LMAO!

      [citation needed]

    3. Ioannis

      Re: LMAO!

      Yes, as in the absence of any journalistic cred, the failsafe is to go back to the Big Book Of Tech Bashing Phrases.

      The Reg got shafted by Apple. Fine. Cry in your pint/milk/meth for a couple of months, froth at the mouth for a couple more, but please, eventually, STFU with your tiresome pimple-faced teenager quips.

    4. Dr. Mouse

      Re: LMAO!

      Deffinitely trolling, but it's quite ironic seeing as Bill Gates was best at recycling other people's best ideas too, and Microsoft continues this tradition today (as I learned from a recent presentation by a MS rep in which most "new features" had been around for years on other systems, except Metro...)

      1. Steve Evans

        @Dr. Mouse

        I didn't think Metro had any redeemable features!

      2. Identity
        WTF?

        Re: LMAO!

        If the Reg wants to accuse Jobs of recycling Xerox PARC's ideas, fine, but Bill Gates?! If anything, Bill recycled Steve's ideas. Remember "look and feel?" (notwithstanding the verdict...)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Mushroom

          "accuse Jobs of recycling Xerox PARC's ideas"

          but to do that, the writer would need to know something about PC business and its history.

    5. Seanie Ryan
      Happy

      Re: LMAO!

      well this is progress at least.. the negative comments from the last articles must have struck a chord with Anna. One entire article without saying anything about "fruity firm" or foxconn.

      This Birdy News Site might actually have someone in charge with enough sense to order copy and paste hacks to make more of an effort. Although she couldnt just write a normal piece without trying to pop in some little dig. Bitter much Anna?

      Happen to agree though, tablets in 2003 would have failed. its well known Apple started dev of the tablet before 2003 and then decided that it wasnt where things were at and switched to the phone. Clever move instead of trying to ram a crap device down consumers throats. (queue the quips about all the other apple products... :-) )

      But i suppose Anna's point is that he was proven sooooo wrong 7 years later. lol. Take that Steve. You fail!

      I thought Ireland was bad for begrudgery!! this is getting commical.

  2. Anonymous Coward 15
    Trollface

    "world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas"

    Pfft, you're just trolling here.

    1. undeadMonkey93

      Re: "world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas"

      At least she's gone a whole Apple related article without calling them Foxconn-rebranders.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas"

        Yeah!

        Why not tho? After all, I want to read the truth. Not someone elses opinion.

      2. ElReg!comments!Pierre
        Trollface

        Re: Foxconn-rebranders

        > At least she's gone a whole Apple related article without calling them Foxconn-rebranders.

        Ha, but the article is about Steve Jobs... he never did any Foxconn-rebranding, ever. That was the job of the rebranding department.

        1. DJ Smiley
          Facepalm

          Re: Foxconn-rebranders

          and Murdock & Rebecca Brooks never did any phone hacking...

    2. Armando 123
      Trollface

      Re: "world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas"

      BTW, do you know what nickname MS employees give to Apple? "R&D South".

  3. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Planned obsolescence?

    > We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail

    which it will do eventually. And once it does fail there doesn't appear to be any alternative but to buy another (except, of course, NOT buying another). That's the genius.

    Oh, you meant the business model?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Gimp

    "...the world's biggest recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas..."

    Oh my! This should be good.

  5. Chad H.

    We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail.

    Actually he was right.

    When you look at the tablets, as they existed at that time, they did fail. I only saw one XP tablet in the wild.

    The tablet needed a complete rethink to make it a success, a rethink he delivered.

    1. Armando 123

      Re: We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail.

      MS might have done the tablet first (or at leat before Apple). Things seemed to be heading tabletward as the tech got more affordable. However, MS viewed it as an oversized PDA. Apple figured out how to make a tablet a proper ly useful device (within certain definitions of usefulness).

      1. Steve Sims
        Headmaster

        Re: We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail.

        MS did not see tablets as oversized PDAs. They saw tablets as laptops without keyboards but with a pen. MS tablets of that era ran full-blown versions of Windows and not the PDA-oriented version of Windows.

        Steve Jobs was right - those tablets did fail to capture a significant market.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail.

      Indeed. The tablets we have now aren't really the same as those envisaged by Microsoft.

      What we have now are devices built from the ground up to be touch devices. Microsoft's approach was a thin veneer over full blown Windows and there was no multitouch or capacitive touch at the time. They still seem to be pushing this lame approach that keeps failing.

      1. JohnG

        Re: We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail.

        "What we have now are devices built from the ground up to be touch devices. Microsoft's approach was a thin veneer over full blown Windows and there was no multitouch or capacitive touch at the time"

        I'll agree about the multitouch but you do seem to have overlooked WindowsCE, which has seen some considerable success, not least with GPS navigation devices.

    3. Alex Schneider
      FAIL

      Re: We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail.

      "...a rethink He delivered..."

      Completely wrong.

      He sat on his hands until the various component technologies had matured sufficiently, then gave the order to turn the crank and poop out the completely obvious product.

  6. Andrew James

    Brilliant

    The Reg made it all the way up to almost 13:30 today without mentioning Steve Jobs' death ... think thats quite a big improvement over the previous personal best.

  7. dave 93
    Facepalm

    So the headline 'quote' from Jobs is actually made up...

    'iPads are toys' is an unlikely statement for Jobs to make years before the iPad was created, don't you think?

    I can see how it would be a good headline if it were true, but it isn't. I am guessing the 'toys' he referred to were tablet PCs running Windows, and you know what - he was right. From all the Metro/Windows 8 review I have seen so far, he is still right.

    Basing your article on this bit of self indulgent fantasy is actually quite funny, but at El Reg's expense, not Steve Jobs'

  8. frank ly

    " ..dual interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs .."

    Shouldn't that be a 'duel' interview?

  9. Tony Batt
    Angel

    Haterz gonna hate

    Anyone else think it's all getting a bit boring now, beardie wierdy linux asses smirking and snarking at the oh so funny Apple disses

    Yawn

    1. Steve Evans
      Linux

      Re: Haterz gonna hate

      Well we have to get our chuckles amidst the barrage of continual iphone/pad rumours from somewhere!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Haterz gonna hate

        Well you could actually innovate and then bring the throng of masses to your baited breath of Android rumour mill spillage but of course it's easier to be a hater and get your shits and giggles from your snigger fests.

  10. Ian 55
    Holmes

    My first thought was that Bill Gates didn't have any..

    .. but I suppose there is

    1. Buying someone else's software (Seattle Computer Products dodgy CP/M clone for the 8086) and selling it to everyone under his own brand

    .. however Apple like to buy someone else's software (NeXT) and keep it to themselves.

    2. Using Xerox's work on GUIs

    .. however Apple did it first.

    3. Screwing users for bug fixes

    .. however IBM did that first.

    4. Using inside OS info to screw the competition

    .. however have Apple done this? Does banning software that gets in the way of Apple making money count?

    5. Putting illegal pressure on OEMs to pay for your software, even on machines that don't have it

    .. however Apple ditched having OEMs being allowed to use their software.

    6. Making Apple grovel to have MS Office

    .. however does what Apple did to the music distributors via their iTunes power count?

    1. john 112

      Re: My first thought was that Bill Gates didn't have any..

      One MS idea:

      1996 XMLHttpRequest - invented ajax and basically web 2.0

      2000 made it into Outlook web access

      2004 Picked up by Google in GMail.

      There are many more. The heck. We can hate them for costing too much and constant skullduggery but have to give credit.

      1. gujiguju

        Re: My first thought was that Bill Gates didn't have any..

        Excellent recall about XMLHttpRequest...however you ignore the salience of it.

        It was only beneficial to all and revolutionized web apps until those same, ingenious Microsoft developers got recruited away, to go to Google in Mountain View.

        They then used it to design Gmail and other cool, new web services & browser UIs. (Besides, remember that Microsoft's "vision" was relegate it, only using XMLHttpRequest in OWA...and ONLY when viewing in IE. Using Netscape or Opera back then defaulted it to an archaic, simple HTML version with less features.)

        Torturing monopolist, indeed.

  11. Sean Timarco Baggaley

    Dear Sir,

    The Daily Express Register is clearly suffering from a collective breakdown over the sudden, unexplained death of Steve "King of iHearts" Jobs. That the great man's actions and tireless leadership form so much of your output is commendable in its way, but it does not help her his family in any way: it only adds further salt into the wound. Lord alone knows how Dodi Al Fayed is feeling now.

    Surely you could think of his boyfriend's grief instead of constantly raking up the past?

    Besides, we all know the truth: Princess Steve Jobs' untimely death in that tunnel should never have happened and it's all the paparazzi's fault. Most would point at the drunk driver instead, but we all know Mr. Stallman was acquitted in the Open Court.

    Yours, in search of a more original conspiracy theory,

    Maj. Gen. Tacticus, DSO, BAR, (Retd.)

  12. johnnymotel

    Jobs famous for bluffing?

    1. ThomH

      Nah, he was probably just joking. 2003 is also the year in which he promised us 3.0 Ghz G5s.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  13. Steve Knox

    Where Steve Jobs Got It Wrong

    I've marked the salient points in bold in the quote below:

    If you've got a bunch of rich guys who can afford their third computer, you know they have a desktop, a portable and now they're going to have a tablet to read with: that's your market.

    An average laptop today costs about the same as the average desktop did back when Mr. Jobs said this. Technology has progressed such that an average laptop has about the same power as a high-end desktop did back then (indeed, laptops back then were not better for much more than what people use tablets for now). But user's needs have not grown as fast as the technology (and the portability of a laptop/tablet is seen as a valued feature) so people are opting for a laptop as their primary computer, and a tablet for their low-end computer, where it would have been desktop/laptop before.

    So no need for a third computer; just an upgrade cycle.

  14. Ramazan

    Jobs speaks from beyond grave?

    Certainly you need a Zombie Jobs icon now

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    READ ME!

    Just like those idiotic climate change articles, this content-free idiotic article is meant to get a response from readers.

    El Reg must be very confident in their reader base; to put up with this kind of nonsense and keep subscribing...

  16. sisk

    What are you smoking?

    Steve Jobs as a recycler of Bill Gates' best ideas? Seriously, what fantasy world are you living in? Let's look at this: Windows - originally a copy of the idea behind Macintosh OS, Zune - a clear iPod ripoff, Aero - an attempt to make Windows look more like Mac. Now as for ideas that Apple copied from Microsoft....um...yeah, got nothing.

    To be fair the tablets that were around in 2003 DID fail, horribly. They weren't the tablets we know and love today. They were PCs shoehorned into a touch screen monitor. They weighed about the same as laptops do today and ran Windows XP. When you consider these tablets, Steve Jobs was spot on with his statements about them.

    I'm far from being an Apple fanboi, but a little perspective on history goes a long way when you're looking at historical interviews.

  17. attoman

    It helps a little if you were there. When Jobs was shown a touch pad and introduced to the idea of a tablet (Dynabook) in 1977 he did not have a clue.

    Jobs went on to steal many great ideas, much more than Gates who preferred to steal from Apple.

    Jobs innovated others inventions.

    Gates caused death and destruction by his criminal use of the OS monopoly. No amount pretense to philanthropy will buy him peace.

    May he live long and suffer.sufer, lt

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like