Jobs gave quite a bit of detail on the development of the Macbook Air and of his fondness for the new laptop, saying he would be the “first one in line to buy one of these”. In a testament to the secrecy surrounding Apple, Jobs stated that they had been developing the Macbook Air for over 2 years, and had gone through over 100 designs before developing something that was light enough, powerful enough but also attractive. Jobs went on to blast competing devices, saying that many of them were “flimsy” compared to the Macbook Air.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jobs doesn’t see the Amazon Kindle being successful, but not because it’s a poor device or undesirable. Jobs is of the opinion that Americans simply don’t read books anymore, and therefore a device based entirely on reading will do poorly. He may be right to the extent that people don’t read traditional cover-to-cover “books” anymore, but people certainly do read text on a daily basis in the form of blogs, news, and other online media, something the Kindle has going for it with the included wireless capability.

Jobs thoughts on the cable industry and the possibility of AppleTV being an all inclusive set to box, complete with DVR functionality, are also unsurprising. For some time people have been hoping Apple would release a competitive device to such services as Cable or digital satellite, but jobs seems quite opposed to going that route with the AppleTV. Jobs in particular was critical of CableCARD, calling the set top box market “loopy” and “fractured”. CableCARD is the semi-open industry standard which would allow third party set top boxes to be used with any digital cable system that supports it, but it seems Apple wants to avoid that mess, and we can’t blame them.