Steve Jobs has spoken out on a range of subjects in an interview at the D8 conference in Los Angeles.

The CEO of Apple was put under the spotlight by US tech stalwarts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and asked to give his thoughts on Apple's battle with Flash, with Google, the company's stance on the "lost" prototype iPhone, and the iPad.

Jobs, who ducked and dived the questions that he wanted to avoid and answered the ones he was happy with, used the interview to cite numerous facts about the inner workings of the company and the performance of its latest product; the iPad.

Telling the audience that the company has sold an iPad every 3 seconds since it launched, the CEO was buoyant that its popularity would continue, saying that the PC will become a minority in the future and that plans for the device actually came before the iPhone.

"I’ll tell you a secret, it began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on with your fingers", he said. "I asked our people about it, and 6 months later they came back with this amazing display".

"I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone”, reports the All things digital blog.

Speaking of which, the iPhone's latest fanfare is expected to be at WWDC on 7 June when new hardware will be unveiled. While Jobs wasn't giving anything away, he did confirm that it won't be dropping Google as a search partner any time soon and did show that he is still unhappy about the "lost" iPhone prototype, saying that Apple is still pursuing it.

"When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got a lot of advice from people who said you’ve got to just let it slide", he said. "You shouldn’t go after a journalist because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you... And, I thought about that and decided that Apple can’t afford to change its core values and simply let it slide... We have the same core values as when we started, and we come into work wanting to do the same thing today that we wanted to do 5 years ago”.

Clearly frustrated by the blogging fraternity, Jobs hit out at the profession: “I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever. Anything we can do to help newspapers find new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for”.

Jobs is also, it seems, clearly frustrated by Adobe's aggressive tack at trying to get Apple to submit and support Adobe Flash on both the iPhone and the iPad. However, it seems as though he isn't having any of it, citing that sometimes you have to choose which technologies you support and which ones you don't. 

Telling his side of the story, Jobs said that Apple informed Adobe that it wouldn't be offering Flash support when it launched the iPhone unless Adobe made the software better, something which, according to him, it failed to do. 

He also turned his attention to the subject of Foxconn and those suicides we've been hearing about lately: “They’ve got restaurants and swimming pools", he said. "For a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory".

So what's next up the Apple CEO's sleeve? Jobs wasn't telling, however, he did reference the company's hobby, the Apple TV.

When questioned on whether it was time to throw out the interface for TV? Jobs suggested, "the problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go-to-market strategy. The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free, so no one wants to buy a box".

"The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it".

Is that an indication that Apple is trying to solve that problem? Could we be about to see an Apple TV screen in the near future? What do you think about that and all the other comments that he made in the interview. Let us know in the comments below.