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Steve Jobs: Let the post-PC era begin (live blog) | Beyond Binary - CNET News

• pohl 16y ago
  "I'll tell you a secret: I actually started on tablet first." Had idea of a multitouch display that you could type on. "About six months later they called me in and showed me this prototype display." This was in the early 2000s. Gave it to one of Apple's early UI folks who got inertia scrolling and other things working. Jobs thought "My god, we can build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet on the shelf because the phone was more important. When we got our wind back and thought we could do something else, we took the tablet back off the shelf." Their degree of secrecy is pretty amazing. I can't help but think, when reading this passage, about how silly it is for the iPhone "dev team" (the jailbreaking community) to talk as if they planted the seed, in Apple's mind, of releasing a native SDK — as if that neuron had never fired within the walls of Apple. I think it's hard for people to imagine remaining so tight-lipped about plans of immense scope.