Steve Jobs on Touch Interfaces: Hardware Wrapped in Software

Once you use this magical display, there's no going back. It's unbelievable. And, so there's a few advantages. Number one, we actually think we've got a better keyboard. And it takes a few days of getting used to it, you know, like it does with any small keyboard. But, I'll bet you dinner that after using it for a week, when you do get your hands on one, you'll think it's really great, really great. We can do Pretty gutsy bet because most of these onscreen all of these onscreen keyboards I've tried, I have not thought were as good as a physical keyboard. But yours is better. Yes, we think so. Again, takes a week to basically, you have to learn how to trust it. Once you learn how to trust it, you fly. Yes. Okay. All right.

And the other nice thing about it, of course, is that we can use that physical space for other things when you don't need a keyboard. Right. And the other thing at and you can keep changing user interface as you come up with new ideas, new applications. We were talking with the folks at Singular one time and they said, well, we have to have a button for this. And we said, oh, don't worry about that. We'll add it after we ship. And they haven't seen the phone yet. They didn't know anything about it. And they looked at us like, We said, don't worry about it. So yes, it provides incredible flexibility to create great user interfaces for different applications and you don't take up half the space of this thing with a physical keyboard. But in addition to that, once you learn how to trust the keyboard, it's a better keyboard. How much time do you think you have before people kind of copy at least the overall form factor of the thing?

I mean, there are some things around the LG Prada and some other phones that sort of look like this. And I ask that because you were forced or you made a decision because of the FCC process to announce this thing much earlier than you usually announce products And to was there a cost to that? I mean, are people going to be able to move faster? If you zoom out of the whole thing and you say, why does the iPod exist? Why is Apple successful in this business? What would the answer be? It would be because the Japanese consumer electronics companies, who were the preeminent hardware makers of consumer electronics until recently, couldn't do software work as well as needed to be done, right?

If you really look at the iPod, it's software. It's a software product and beautiful hardware. It's software in the device. It's, as we said, software on the PC or the Mac and it's software in the cloud with the store. It's software wrapped in a beautiful package. And the Japanese consumer electronics companies couldn't make the leap to create that kind of software. And that's why Apple enjoys the success it does with the iPod. If you look at handsets, it looks very similar. The handset manufacturers, have got their hardware down, but they haven't been able to make the leap to software. And just like with plays for sure and stuff, Microsoft has some software that they can go license, but it's on a fairly small number of phones and it's of a certain caliber.

And so if you really look at an iPhone, it's software wrapped in really wonderful hardware. And so people the usual suspects will try to copy the hardware and it will take them some time and and maybe they will and maybe they won't be able to copy the hardware. But the software is at least five years ahead of anything we've seen.