Steve Jobs said that Apple started work on the iPad months before it started developing the iPhone, but shelved it to chase the bigger phone market. The disclosure came during a nearly two-hour Q&A with the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D8 confab in California Tuesday night.

Evidently the iPhone touch screen and inertial scrolling derives from Apple's original tablet work and Jobs' own personal vision.

He also said that when he came back to run the place Apple was about 90 days away from going bankrupt, in worse shape than he expected. That explains why Apple had to take an investment from Microsoft and makes the fact that Apple's market cap passed Microsoft's last week all the more "surreal," as Jobs put it.

Now with the iPad out he claims that the post-PC era has started. In a kinda slippery analogy he compared PCs to trucks: "When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farm." Cars became more popular as cities developed. "PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around" but "only one out of 25 people will need them." With advances in chips and software, tablets should be capable of the work done now on traditional PCs like video editing and graphics art. "This transformation is going to make some people uneasy."

The man who still sells Macs couldn't predict when all this was going to happen.

He said Google "decided to compete with us, and so they are." Mostly in phones. "We didn't go into the search business." As far as the Chrome OS goes it "is not really baked yet" even if it's based on WebKit, the open source widgetry Apple advanced. When asked if he felt betrayed by former Apple board member Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, Jobs responded with the non-sequitur, "My sex life is pretty good."

On Flash: "We didn't set out to have a war with Adobe." Apple has limited resources and picks the technologies it'll invest in very carefully. "To incorporate Flash is a lot of work." On top of which technologies have seasons before going to the graveyard. Apple is interested in emerging technologies and picked 3.5-inch drives over five-inch drives; USB instead of serial and parallel ports; Flash "is waning," HTML5 is "starting to emerge. Customers are paying us to make those choices. "People seem to be liking iPads - we're selling one every three seconds since we launched them. Right now I'm worried that it takes us three whole seconds to make them."