Jobs at D: We still love the Mac, Apple TV a hobby (for now)
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 30, 2007 at 5:40pm
In an interview with journalist Wall Mossberg at the fifth annual “D—All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, California, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple wasn’t abandoning the Mac despite its January name change from “Apple Computer” to “Apple Inc.”
He said that today Apple is in three businesses: the Mac, the iPod and iPhone. The Apple TV, potentially a fourth business, is currently a “hobby,” Jobs said.
“I call it a hobby because a lot of people have tried and failed to make [media centers] a business, such as Tivo and Microsoft,” he explained. “It’s a hard problem. If we work on it and improve over the next 18 months or two years, we can crack that.”
Jobs told Mossberg that the Apple TV doesn’t support high-def video presently because of the long download times for such files. However, he said that could change.
The Apple CEO said that he doesn’t consider the Apple TV a “set-top box” as such. Apple considers it the “DVD player for the Internet.”
In talking about the Mac, Jobs touted the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”), rising Mac sales and the increasing popularity of laptops. He said that Apple sells more notebooks as a percentage of sales compared to other personal computer vendors and see a time when notebooks make up 80 to 90 percent of Mac sales.
What’s more, Mac growth since the move to Intel processors has been three times typical market growth worldwide and nearly five times in the U.S., Jobs noted. And when it comes to the iPod, which hasn’t been updated in a while, the CEO said that Apple is “working on the best iPods we have every worked on and they are awesome.”
He also told Mossberg that with the popularity of the cross platform iTunes, Apple is now a major developer of Windows software.
“We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people who say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows,” he said. “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
