The Ashes

After the Rock and Roll event Apple hosted yesterday morning, The New York Times interviewed Steve Jobs to gain a sense about what Steve Jobs is feeling about different situations and products on the market today. Jobs took a swipe at Amazon.com and even discussed why the Apple iPod Touch does not have a video camera.

Yesterday morning, Apple announced that the new iPod Nano will have a video camera and an FM tuner.

When David Pogue of The New York Times asked Jobs why the iPod Touch did not end up having a video camera, here’s what the response was:

Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multi-touch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.

We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff — we need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.

When talking about what he thinks about e-readers, Jobs pointed out that Amazon.com never mentions how many Kindles have been sold. Therefore Apple does not believe e-readers are not a big market.