Dec. 2003: Rolling Stone interview

In an interview with Rolling Stone that appeared in December 2003, Jobs offered a "lucid and careful contemplation of the music industry," said CNET's Greg Sandoval in assessing Apple CEO's thoughts five years later. Sandoval was "bowled over by the preciseness of Jobs' assessment of what the future held for digital rights management, music subscription services, the four largest recording companies, and Apple."

Said Jobs in the Rolling Stone interview: "Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: we do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we're really good at packaging that all together into a product....We're the only people left in the computer industry [who] do that. And we're really the only people in the consumer electronics industry [who] go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers, and they can also be used to make things like iPods."

Asked if he had wrung his hands over the decision to bring iTunes to Windows, Jobs told the music magazine, "I don't know what hand-wringing is."

Credit: Screenshot by Greg Sandoval/CNET