Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's D8 conference this evening, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said he expected tablets like the iPad would eventually supplant the personal computer for most people; and that the idea for the iPad actually came before the iPhone.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's D8 conference this evening, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said he expected tablets like the iPad would eventually supplant the personal computer for most people; and that the idea for the iPad actually came before the iPhone.

Jobs also commented on Flash, the "lost" iPhone, the Foxconn suicides, the competition with Google, and even his sex life in a wide ranging conversation with the Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

When asked if tablets will replace notebooks, Jobs used the analogy of trucks versus cars, saying all vehicles used to be trucks, but now more are cars. Cars added things like windshield wipers and automatic transmissions, so they attracted more people, but trucks continue to sell, just in less volume. He said the same thing will happen to PCs (explicitly meaning Windows and Mac-based personal computers) and that will be very jarring for those of us used to the PC era.

"I think people can create a lot of content on the tablet," Jobs said. He noted that people could use Bluetooth keyboards and that the software will get more powerful over time. He said he could imagine everything from productivity applications to video editing to music on a tablet.

Jobs said he actually started work on a tablet first, long before the iPhone. He said he had the idea in the early 2000's for typing on a glass display, and took the idea to people on his team who invented things like inertial scrolling. But the company was working on a phone at the time, so he applied that to the phone, and put the tablet "on the shelf." Once the iPhone business was established, they took the tablet project off the shelf, and that became the iPad.

Jobs said the problem with earlier tablets was the stylus. When you take that out, you take out the precision of a desktop operating system, so you need a completely different user interface, he said.

When asked whether the iPad and tablets can save journalism, he talked about the difficulties facing newspapers and other editorial organizations. "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of just bloggers myself," he said. Anything they could do to help The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal get paid enough to keep their editorial operations going is a good thing.

His advice to publishers was to "price it aggressively and go for volume," and he suggested that electronic content should cost less than print because it doesn't have the expense of printing and delivering.

On pricing for books on the iPad, he said the changed model would make publishers more responsive to demand as a driver for pricing.

On the decision not to support Flash, Jobs said Apple has been successful by choosing which technologies to ride. "We try to choose things that are in their Springs," he said, saying the company chooses to focus on emerging technologies and does that well. He talked about how Apple was first in adopting 3.5-inch drives and USB 2.0, and in removing things like serial and parallel ports, floppy drives, etc.

Seventy-five percent of the video may be in Flash, but 25 percent to 50 percent is also going to be in video, Jobs said. "There are holes in some Web sites, but those holes are getting fixed really fast," Jobs said, adding that the holes that are there are mainly ads.

Jobs said Apple decided not to support Flash on the iPhone years ago, but it was only when the iPad came out that Adobe "made a stink about it."

"Different people make different choices," Jobs said. If the company makes the right choices of technology to invest in, customers "will buy them; if we don't, they won't," he said. And with the iPad, "We've sold one every three seconds since we launched them."

He said Apple supported one open platform -including browsers and HTML5 - and one "curated platform" where a bunch of people make sure the application does what it says, doesn't crash, and doesn't use unsupported APIs. He said Apple approves 95 percent of the applications it receives for the App Store. Jobs said Apple has a policy of not allowing applications that deface people, but made an exception for political cartoons.

The opportunities for content owners to get closer to their customers are enormous, Jobs said. Movie companies used to spend a lot of money running trailers on TV; now they can spend money more effectively online targeting customers directly. Jobs said studios need new ways of communicating with their customers - and need to let customers watch the content whenever they want, wherever they want.

iPhone on Verizon?

Jobs was evasive about whether Apple would support multiple U.S. carriers for the iPhone, such as Verizon. Would there be an advantage in having multiple carriers? "There might be," he said. Will Apple do that? "The future is long."

Jobs said AT&T is "doing fine in a lot of ways," saying it is handling a lot more data traffic than all its competitors combined, and said its biggest issue was getting equipment from its suppliers, on what he said was the fastest network. He said he thought any of the other carriers would have had the same problems, and that AT&T would end up with the most robust network because of its early experience.

In response to an audience question about dropped phone calls, he said he understood that a lot of equipment had to be replaced, and things typically had to get worse before they got better. But he said he had a lot of faith things would be a lot of better in most places by the end of the summer.

Asked about Google, Jobs said, "they decided to compete with us." When pressed about his relationship with Eric Schmidt or Google, he said "my sex life is pretty good. How's yours?"

Jobs said he wasn't going to remove Google or Google Maps from the iPhone, or go into the search business. What he said he likes about the consumer market against the enterprise market is that each person votes for themselves, and if enough people vote for your product, you stay in business. "Just because we're competing with somebody doesn't mean we have to be rude."

"We never saw ourselves in a platform war with Microsoft -- maybe that's why we lost," Jobs said. Instead, "We were always trying to build a better product.... And that's how we still think about it."

Jobs noted that every modern Web browser, including Google's Chrome, is based on WebKit, which was Apple's browser project that was made open source; and he said making it open source helped make it a real competitor to Internet Explorer.

Jobs added that Apple was going into the mobile advertising business in order to lets its developers make more money, so they could continue to offer free or low-cost applications. He said that the free and low-cost application was changing how people used their devices, and said that as a result, on phones people aren't using search as much as on PCs. Instead, he said, phone users need advertisements that don't take them "out of the app" and into the browser, but instead leaves users within the application.

Asked about privacy, Jobs said that he thought Apple took privacy very seriously, more than most other Silicon Valley companies. For instance, he said, rather than telling applications they had to ask to get location information, Apple provides the data and always puts up a screen asking for permission. "A lot of people in the Valley think we are really old-fashioned about these things," he said.

On the lost iPhone, he said one of Apple's employees was testing a phone - he said it wasn't clear whether it was lost in a bar or taken from the employee's bag -and the person who took the phone tried to shop it around. He said the person under suspicion's roommate was the one who called the police, not Apple; and that courts were making sure the police were only looking at relevant data on the confiscated PC.

On the Foxconn suicides, he said flatly, "Foxconn is not a sweatshop." He said it's a factory, but it has restaurants, movie theaters, swimming pools, etc., and said that the suicide attempts were "very troubling." He said the suicide attempt rate there was less that in the U.S., but the company was very interested in studying and improving the environment there.

Jobs said Apple passing Microsoft in market capitalization was "surreal" but not all that important, saying it has nothing to do with why Apple employees go to work, or why people buy Apple products.

He credited Apple's resurgences to the employees, talking about how when he got back he found lots of people who said they "bleed in six colors," a reference to the old Apple logo.

He said Apple was organized as "the biggest startup on the planet" with no committees and with people who trust each other. He said what he does all day long is meet with product teams and help them make better products.

Jobs said Apple's core values are the same today as they were five or 10 years ago, to make products that people like. And he said the same would be true in the future.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch opened the conference by talking about how the worlds of content and technology have come much closer together over the eight years of the D conference.

"As human freedom advances and human beings have more chance to interact, innovation increases," Murdoch said. Thanks to technology and the crumbing of barriers to trade, men and women who live in even the most remote places have access to innovation, he said, expecting an asymmetric benefit for countries and companies that are innovating.

Users and carriers of content have recognized the status quo has to change. Just as Steve (Jobs) needs to be paid to keep producing iPads, so do content creators need to be paid, Murdoch said, noting that News Corp. was successfully charging for access to Web sites and its iPad applications.

Originally posted to Michael Miller's blog, Forward Thinking.