Steve Jobs wants to save us from Adobe Flash, our PC’s and Now Porn

Steve Jobs has gone crazy. Taking the bait on a late-night e-mail from Valleywag Editor Ryan Tate, Jobs defended Apple’s App Store for offering “freedom from porn,” among other things.

Tate posted the entire back-and-forth, which began with his slightly drunken rage over an iPad commercial that promises a revolution. Tate tells Jobs that revolutions are about freedom: “If (Bob) Dylan was 20 today … Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution?’”

Jobs’ response:

“Yep. Freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.”

After a thread of seven e-mails debating Apple’s ban on Flash for iPhone OS devices, the merits of native vs. cross-compiled apps, and a police raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home — another Gawker media blog along with Valleywag — Jobs dismissed Tate and writers in general:

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others [sic] work and belittle their motivations?”

It’s certainly possible that Jobs didn’t write the e-mails himself, but they fit his profile: Concise, opinionated, and completely bereft of corporate speak. If Apple public relations was picking through each line, they didn’t change much. Besides, Jobs sent the e-mails between 12:52 a.m. and 2:20 a.m.

As for the content of Jobs’ e-mails, I agree with Tate that Jobs’ offer of “freedom from porn” is unsettling in an Orwellian sort of way. It’s also not true, as there’s plenty of sexual content to be had just by searching the Web in Safari; and some adult material is selectively offered for iPhones despite Apple’s policy against it.

More troubling is how Jobs’ definition of freedom entails shielding your eyes from offensive material, as Apple defines it. That’s a slippery slope, and it’s already caused trouble in Cupertino. I think there’s value in criticizing Apple on that front, even if you haven’t created tech products yourself.

Bizarre interpretations of freedom aside, I enjoyed reading the e-mail exchange between Jobs and Tate. There’s a difference between spin and opinion, and Jobs’ e-mails display the latter. I can’t say the same is true with Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, who has also sent e-mails to bloggers. Jobs is a perfect fit for Twitter, after all.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/196427/steve_jobs_spars_with_valleywag_editor_by_email.html

Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom From Porn’

I didn’t plan to pick a fight with Steve Jobs last night. It just sort of happened: An iPad advertisement ticked me off; I sent the Apple CEO an angry email; he told me about “freedom from porn.”

The electronic debate proceeded from there.

Of course, there was a bit more to it than that. There’s the context: Jobs’ legal fight with my employer Gawker Media, over the handling of an iPhone prototype; my long-simmering worries about Apple’s growing power to limit self expression through its lockdown on iPad apps; and the fact that my wife, who might normally (and quite sensibly) veto the idea of spending Friday night sending email flames, was out of town.

So in retrospect I was primed to lash out. But there was some serendipity too: Watching a new episode of 30 Rock on my digital video recorder, I somehow failed to skip over an Apple ad I’d never seen before, one that billed the iPad as nothing less than “a revolution.” You can see an excerpt of the ad at the bottom of this post.

With a Stinger cocktail at my side, I dashed off a short, pointed question to Jobs’ well-known email address.

A few hours later—after midnight here in California—he got back to me. And I got back to him. And so on.

I didn’t identify myself as a writer for Gawker in my initial email, sent from my ryantate.com email address. But, as you’ll see in the exchange below, I eventually made my affiliation clear, and Jobs didn’t seem bothered. Between that and the fact that Jobs regularly uses emails to disclose new information to the public, knowing full well recipients now regularly make the exchanges public, I feel fine reproducing the thread below.

It’s a feisty discussion, as you’ll see. And heated, especially on my part.

Rare is the CEO who will spar one-on-one with customers and bloggers like this. Jobs deserves big credit for breaking the mold of the typical American executive, and not just because his company makes such hugely superior products: Jobs not only built and then rebuilt his company around some very strong opinions about digital life, but he’s willing to defend them in public. Vigorously. Bluntly. At two in the morning on a weekend.

As much as Jobs and his actions anger me, and as harsh as I was to him, I came away from the exchange impressed with his willingness to engage.

Some notes on the actual content follow after the emails. Click any message to enlarge:

A few notes on the emails:

• There’s something absurdly Orwellian about Jobs’ line that the iPad provides “freedom from porn.” It’s a statement I suspect will haunt him.
• My line about Flash and my MacBook Pro is silly; Flash as a Web plugin is, as I myself have written, a resource hog, no matter how well the miraculous battery in my Apple laptop handles that hoggery. There’s no telling how Flash might hobble my iPad”s A4 processor. But cross-compiled Flash apps are an entirely different matter: They run as native Objective C code, and Apple has a chance to review them for performance. Apple has never tried to argue that cross-compiled Flash wears batteries down any more quickly than other Objective C code, and in fact approved more than two dozen such apps before changing its policies.
• Speaking of regrettable lines: Why the heck did I bring up my wife in connection with “freedom from porn?” I was trying to say it’s a canard that porn somehow harms families, or something terrible and shameful, so I mentioned the other half of my family.
• I was a little unfair summarizing my contact with Time Inc.; the company has not “crowed” about its iPad bridge software, and in fact has plans to iteratively improve its iPad product. That line was based on email exchange that I had with a Time Inc. executive who was speaking off the record and not on behalf of the company. As such, I’ve blurred a name that I had no business dropping. But I do think, as I said, that a native Objective C app that merely contains magazine content, like Time‘s, is a lot less exciting than an app that has some real interactivity, even if it’s been cross compiled from Flash.

And here is the end of the iPad commercial that set me off: