All Things Digital

In a on-stage interview, Apple CEO and Silicon Valley legend-in-his-own-time Steve Jobs shared his views with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference (D8).

I  experienced the Jobs interview virtually via CNET's live blog written by Ina Fried who is on the scene at D8. The following is a synopsis of what Jobs said as studiously reported by Ina on the live blog.

Jobs shared much of his philosophy, which is based on "choosing which horses to ride very carefully." That was his explanation of ditching Flash, the 3.5-inch floppy disk and other technologies before competitors make the shift.

"We try to pick things in their 'springs.' If you choose wisely you can save your self an enormous amount of work," he said.

Regarding the controversy over dropping Flash, the popular video format from Adobe, in favor of newly established HTML 5, Jobs said: "We're trying to make great products for people. We at least have the courage of our convictions....We're going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers...they are paying us to make those choices."

"If we succeed they''ll buy them, and if we don't, they won't. So far, I have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. We've sold one every three seconds since we launched it," Jobs said.

He was asked about the prototype iPhone lost in a bar by an Apple employee, sold to Gizmodo and now a legal case under investigation by San Mateo, CA prosecutors.

Jobs couldn't comment because of the ongoing investigation, but he said it was a great story and offered his own interpretation of what went down. "It's got theft. It's got buying stolen property. It's got extortion," he said. It probably has sex in there somewhere, he added. "Somebody should make a movie out of this," he concluded.

Asked about suicides at the Foxconn factory in China where iPhones are manufactured, Jobs said,  "We're all over this ... Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It's a factory, but they've got restaurants and movie theaters." He maintained that suicide rate at Foxconn has been 13 out of 400,000 for first half of year, which is under the U.S. rate of 11 per 100,000, but he still found the statistic troubling.