Down the Memory Hole -- Apple has chosen their meaning for 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.

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.