Steve Jobs Meetings, Tablets, and iPhones

This Guardian.co.uk article describes Steve Jobs presence at executive meetings and recounts his comments during a meeting with the National Institutes of Health CIO in 2002.

At the time, the iPod was just a year old, and the Microsoft had recently launched a tablet form factor PC. Jobs reportedly had a number of reasons that tablets were not a product he was interested in producing. These included

- small market
- bad form factor
- high wireless bandwidth not available
- poor screen resolution for medical images

In September 2002, he made a similar public statements expressing doubts about the Tablet form factor

We're not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It's turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your e-mail? We have all the technology ourselves to do that - we just don't know whether it will be successful

When questioned about the iPhone in the same NIH meeting, he described the convergence of computing and phones and said that product would "have to fit in your shirt pocket, and be better than either a phone or a computer by itself."

Readers should note that these comments were made in 2002 (almost 5 years ago) and may not be relevant today.