Steve Jobs opens the next chapter in the revitalization of the company that pioneered the PC: a laptop that thinks-and looks-different.
By Steven Levy (online at http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/st/ty0105_1.htm)
"Pick it up!" says Steve Jobs. "Let's go for a walk!" It's a few days before Apple's charismatic interim CEO will introduce his new object of desire, the iBook, to the world, and he's thrilled to air out the distinctive, clam-shaped consumer laptop. Grabbing one of two units on a long table (the one with the blueberry-colored rubber on its shell), he motions his NEWSWEEK visitor to take the one with the tangerine-orange trimmings. The 44-year-old Apple cofounder, decked out in cargo shorts, sandals and the beginnings of a full beard, has set up the machines to run movie trailers piped in from the Internet-a James Bond for him, an Austin Powers for his visitor. With 6.7-pound computers in hand, a trip across the long conference room begins-unencumbered by power cords or connecting wires. On the respective laptops' bright displays, Pierce Brosnan and Fat Bastard are unperturbed. "Look at what we're doing here," cries Jobs, almost breaking out in a post-touchdown-esque chicken dance. "We've got Internet streaming media as we walk around! Isn't this why we got into this business in the first place?"
These are the giddy days for Steve Jobs. Barely two years after rejoining the company that gave him the boot in 1985, he's taken it from what he describes as "a coma" to a picture of health. Black ink, once a foreign substance in Cupertino, Calif., has filled the corporate ledger books for seven consecutive quarters-and the firm's coffers, nearly bare when he arrived, now bulge with more than $3 billion in cash. Fueled by the success of the huggable, balloony iMac-one of the world's best-selling PCs of late-Apple has nearly quadrupled its consumer market share, to about 12 percent. An award-winning ad campaign featuring the company's different-thinking heroes-from John Lennon to Jobs's own idol, Mahatma Gandhi-has upped company morale and revitalized its public image.
Now comes the computer that will fill the final niche in Jobs's four-pronged product strategy involving mobile and desktop computers for the pro and the consumer: a $1,600 laptop that fulfills the promise of "an iMac to go." This was pretty much expected. The surprise is that the iBook is rigged to easily accept some optional equipment that allows a wireless high-speed Internet connection.
While other schemes have provided various ways to shed wires, this one, called AirPort, breaks ground by its speed, price and ease of use. By slipping a $99 card into a slot under the keyboard, the iBook's built-in antennas can pick up a signal beamed by a $299 saucerlike base station (connected to a phone or Ethernet jack) the size of an ostrich egg. Best of all, up to 10 iBooks can use a single base station. This makes it ideal for classroom use, freeing schools from the onerous hassles of providing a rat's nest of wires for Internet connections. "It's a really big win," says Sun Microsystems' ace engineer Bill Joy. "Wireless should be high speed and cheap, and Apple's done this."
To Jobs, the iBook's advances, in both technology and design, represent a continuing vindication of his theory that it makes sense for a computer company to make "the whole widget," meaning hardware, operating system and marketing support. "We're the only company in the industry that can take responsibility for the whole user experience," he says. Apple can gain market share, he insists, by coming up with new ideas, an approach that many of his gearhead competitors have forgotten. "In terms of innovation the industry is bankrupt," he says. "In the Wintel space, innovation means slightly higher chip speed, slightly bigger disk drive, same old beige box."
The iBook is anything but a same-old. To Jonathan Ive, who heads Apple's design studio, the new laptop isn't a knockoff of a mollusk, but a bubble, figuratively blown from the ringlike recessed plastic loop that works as the machine's handle. Ive happily rattles off its many subtle improvements, like the sleep light that pulses warmly instead of the mechanical blink of previous indicators, the compact yo-yo-shaped power-cord holder and the snaplike action that makes the iBook close snugly as a car door without an annoying latch.
Because the iBook pushes the envelope in such tricky ways, particularly in its use of a rugged rubberized finish over a special translucent polycarbon plastic, it's taken a few months longer to produce than expected. But, Jobs says, better late than second-rate. And pundits agree that the Apple's biggest iBook problem will be meeting demand.
Still, Apple is far from home free. Skeptics still wonder how the company will maintain its price structure when some companies have business models based on giving computers away. And it has yet to elucidate its full-blown Internet strategy. Part of it undoubtedly will involve Quicktime, Apple's streaming video and audio technology. Though 10 million Web users have downloaded it, and Apple just announced a "Quicktime TV" suite of Web-based channels, including Disney and BBC World Service, the standard faces tough competition with full-time Net companies like Real Networks.
Then there's the "interim" issue. While Jobs is meticulous in attributing the company's turnaround to its management team and employees, Apple is led in both fact and spirit by a temp who takes no salary, owns a single share of stock and discourages talk about the length of his service. "I probably should get around to thinking about it one of these days," he admits. Right now, he claims that he's got a good balance between family life and running two companies (besides Apple, he is the noninterim CEO of the Pixar animation studio, now readying "Toy Story 2," the triumphant return of Woody and Buzz).
Interim or not, Jobs takes pride in the revitalization of what he started 22 years ago in his garage. "It's like there was this really beautiful Porsche that had been sitting out in a field, and got really dirty, covered with mud," he says. "In the last two years, we've taken it through the car wash, and now it's this really beautiful speedster and we're polishing it up constantly, and putting on new tires..." And with his success at reviving Apple, the sometimes prickly computer pioneer has come to terms with his past. When the TV movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" ran in June, he invited his pal, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, for a home viewing. Though he found the film "mean-spirited," he was impressed with actor (and "ER" star) Noah Wyle's impersonation of him. "I called him the next day just to tell him he did a nice job," he says. By the end of the conversation, Jobs had invited Wyle to come to the Macworld show in New York City.
And so, at last Wednesday's keynote speech, Wyle, dressed in Jobs's signature jeans and sweat shirt, reprised his Steve mimicry, to the delight of the Macintosh faithful. But the crowd roared even more when the real Steve Jobs unveiled the new iBook-the latest evidence that no computer company can swashbuckle like Apple.
Newsweek, August 2, 1999
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