In the days before Jobs’s speech last week, Apple was uncharacteristically boastful, guaranteeing the latter. On its Web site, the company ran a series of teasers that breathlessly informed its fans that even their fertile imaginations were incapable of envisioning the marvel that awaited them during Jobs’s scheduled filibuster in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
And what was the development that promised to blow off the audience’s collective socks as they sat in the “front row of the future”? A makeover of the iMac computer, once renowned for bringing cool design to the formerly drab art of computer packaging but now, at age three, a little long in the tooth. The new version, not surprisingly, turns out to be more powerful than the previous iMac (boasting the mightier G4 chip as opposed to the original’s G3) and has what is known as a SuperDrive, allowing it to create CDs and even DVDs. All this has been available in other Macs, and the new iMac (priced between $1,300 and $1,800, a good deal but steep for an entry-level machine) runs the same software as its cousins. The iMac’s real draw is its design. Think Luxo lamp, but instead of a shade there’s a sharp flat-screen monitor. The base is a sleek plastic dome 10 inches in diameter. The two are connected by a double-jointed chrome arm that lets you move the screen around with a fingertip. It’s the kind of thing that you’d expect to see in an Architectural Digest photo shoot of Captain Kirk’s bed table.
Jobs, as is his practice, planned the unwrapping of his new bombshell as the climax of his two-hour presentation. But for the first time, he sacrificed the surprise element for a shot at a cover piece in a national newsweekly (not this one). Though he was unpleasantly surprised that the story appeared on the publication’s Canadian Web site the previous evening (where Mac fans instantly noted it and spread the news before the site was shut down), he later said that this blunder only hastened the inevitable–he’d always figured that by the time of the Monday keynote, the news would have spread from the first people who saw issues of the magazine. The guaranteed coverage, though, was more important to Jobs than preserving his usually inviolate mystique.
Clearly, for Jobs last week, managing the news was more important than making it. That’s because, unlike Apple’s truly groundbreaking iPod, the new iMac required proactive hyping. While its coolness pedigree is inarguable, the new iMac is not a revolutionary product, but a continuation of a careful strategy that was already well understood in the industry. Jobs’s mandate at Apple is to keep making computers that are so attractive that the millions of people still using Macintoshes will be loath to abandon the platform. He also hopes to get a nice chunk of the ever-shrinking pool of first-time buyers, and even a few defectors from the 95 percent of the world who use Windows. His other weapon is Macintosh software, which includes a spiffy operating system rolled out last year, and a suite of free applications which make it easy to handle music, movies and pictures on Macs. (In his keynote Jobs introduced a program for the latter, called iPhoto.) The idea is to make Macintosh a “digital hub” that allows its users to more easily take advantage of new advances in multimedia and wireless networking.
Still, after four years of stellar innovation under Jobs, Apple’s market share hasn’t significantly grown. One big reason is that inertia favors the competition. While many essential applications and peripherals are available for the Mac, Windows users still have a wider range of choices, often at lower prices. For example, on DVD movies that people buy or rent, the “bonus extras” on the disks often include computer-readable CD-ROM features like games and screenplays–but these are accessible only to those with Windows machines. Part of the Jobs keynote was inadvertent testimony to Apple’s struggles to generate a strong base of third-party software. Chairman Jobs introduced a series of software executives promising that key programs that Windows users already enjoyed would be coming to Macs… soon. But it’s hard to get excited about the upcoming Mac version of a “Harry Potter” game when Windows users and videogame owners had it under their Christmas trees.
As many of the moody geniuses portrayed in Steve Jobs’s famous 1997 ad campaign could have probably told you, “thinking different” has its price. The genius of Steve Jobs is that through vision, inspiration, hard work and, yes, hype, he and his team have come up with a series of triumphs–sleek titanium PowerBooks, groundbreaking AirPort wireless-networking devices, awesomely nifty iPods and now the world’s brainiest desk lamp–to overcome that continual handicap. God help him if the string doesn’t continue.
