Steve Jobs vs Porn

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Valleywag‘s Ryan Tate had one too many drinks the other night and while he was watching 30 Rock a particular Apple iPad ad sent him over the edge. The following is an e-mail exchange between Tate and Jobs. The gist being that Steve and co. are only trying to protect our freedom against porn. And Flash. It’s interesting to see how candid Jobs is about the closed nature of the iPhone OS.

Tate:

If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?

Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with “revolution?”

Revolutions are about freedom.

Jobs:

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.

Tate:

Honest, my MacBook Pro 13 battery holds up fine against Flash. The battery is boos. So is my iPad battery. I’d rather have Wired magazine app that some interactivity rather than one that is a glorified PDF. So why not? Just because Adobe tried to f*ck you guys in the late 90s? It’s not a question of pure Cocoa vs. Flash cross compile. It’s a question of weak content in an approved wrapper vs. something interactive that happens to be cross compiled by Adobe.
And you know what? I don’t want “freedom from porn.” Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.

Jobs:

Wired is doing a native Cocoa app. So is almost every publisher. And you might care more about porn when you have kids…

They then go back and forth about which programming language publishers should use to create interactive versions of their respective magazines. Tate hates TIME but loves Wired and so on.

And then there was this from Jobs to Tate.

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

Bazinga!