Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs let loose a doozy of a one liner at today’s D conference in Southern California. Under friendly questioning from the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg (and from the newspaper that won a Pulitzer prize on options backdating, not one question about the subject for Jobs), the man in the black turtleneck said that the number of copies of iTunes that exist is “several” times the number of existing iPods, or hundreds of millions. That means that Apple is one of the biggest developers of applications that work on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows machines, right? “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell,” said Jobs.
Jobs also made an interesting comment about Apple TV, which Brent Schlender eviscerated in the new issue of Fortune. He called the product a “hobby,” not a business. Apple, he said, is in three businesses and a hobby, the three businesses being Macintosh computers, music and phones. That certainly puts things in perspective, no?
Finally, showing that he does have a sense of humor, Jobs said he has read the uproarious, and often nasty, Web site Fake Steve Jobs. “I get asked a lot if I know who writes it,” he said. “And I don’t. But I’ve read it a few times, and it’s funny.”
