"Like the Ministry of Truth, it appears that Apple is deliberately attempting to usurp the meaning of the word Flash in the computing industry and redefine it."
Were Apple attempting to bring new meaning to the term flash this would be (at best) a passable assertion. However, the term "flash" has been used to refer to silicon-based NOR and NAND memory since the beginning. I don't know the exact date, but I know it was around in the early nineties ('91-'92) when I started messing with computers.
Macromedia Flash didn't come in to existence until the late nineties, and I'm certain that flash memory existed for a long time before I was even aware of it. That means flash memory easily pre-dates Adobe Flash by a wide margin.
At least with the people I work with, the term "flash" is used to refer to the Adobe product. When we're talking about flash memory we use a variety of other terms, but not simply "flash."
Jobs wasn't talking at your workplace. So what you talk about with your coworkers is kind of irrelevant.
In the context of an Apple quarterly performance conference call, Flash RAM is arguably the more relevant sense, since so much of Apple's product line uses it and thus it plays a major role in Apple's business.
The person posing the question failed to specify, allowing Jobs to deflect the question by choosing the meaning most convenient.
This is just painfully stupid. Flash, in the sense of memory, isn't an Apple neologism. It's been around for years.
Jobs was making a joke, and deflecting a question he didn't want to address on the call. Hell, half the conflict with Adobe is no longer an issue - Apple dropped the restriction preventing Adobe's Flash-to-iOS-app tool from being used.
I assume the change is either 1) because Apple used to buy Flash storage in hard drive-shaped SSD packaging and now just go with the bare electronics to save space, or else 2) they called it an SSD before because it was relatively new and the familiar 'disk' terminology would be reassuring to customers, but now they figure that the market won't flinch at the lack of anything called a 'Disk' of any sort.
They've had Flash-based iPods for a long time, and the iPhone, and iPad, but they never bothered saying they had "SSDs".
I mean, what is an SSD? As far as I can tell, it's a bit of flash and a controller, packaged in such away that it is compatible with standard hard drive connections and mounts so that it can be used in place of existing hard drives.
If a device isn't designed to have user-replaceable storage, then there's no good reason to use SSD packaging. Just use the bare circuit board and chips, plugged into a header or one of those really thin ribbon cables, or just directly on the device's main circuit board.
Were Apple attempting to bring new meaning to the term flash this would be (at best) a passable assertion. However, the term "flash" has been used to refer to silicon-based NOR and NAND memory since the beginning. I don't know the exact date, but I know it was around in the early nineties ('91-'92) when I started messing with computers.
Macromedia Flash didn't come in to existence until the late nineties, and I'm certain that flash memory existed for a long time before I was even aware of it. That means flash memory easily pre-dates Adobe Flash by a wide margin.