Jobs' Golden Apple

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

It's a classic tale, told and retold through the ages: the hero reaches for greatness but fails, finds wisdom and maturity in scarred exile, then comes home to save his dying kingdom in Act III. Watching Steve Jobs hold his gorgeous new iBook triumphantly aloft before his assembled legions at last week's MacWorld convention in New York City, it was easy to imagine Apple Computer's interim-CEO-for-life perched somewhere in the pantheon between Odysseus and Simba the Lion King.

At 44, Steve Jobs has entered his golden age. He's rich, happily married and the loving father of three. His digital studio, Pixar, has reinvented the animation industry with such groundbreaking films as Toy Story and A Bug's Life (its next release, Toy Story 2, is due in November). Then there's Apple, whose resurgence since Jobs retook the helm two years ago has surprised observers who'd predicted only a downward spiral, and has delighted die-hard Mac loyalists with its new hit lineup of powerful G3s and sexy iMacs.

Now, in tangerine or blueberry, comes the iBook, Apple's "iMac to go," a clamshell-shaped laptop that promises to do for the portable market what iMac did for the desktop--sell like crazy and leave the rest of the industry playing catch-up. The iBook, available this September, morphs iMac's elegant, curvilinear design and Life Savers colors into an affordable portable (see chart) with a bunch of minor innovations and one major one: AirPort, a PC version of the cordless phone. AirPort's snap-in card and UFO-shaped "base station" (a $400 optional package) allow up to 10 users to swap data and surf the Web wirelessly from a range of up to 150 ft., putting Apple at least a few fiscal quarters ahead of its Windows rivals in the race to free humanity from those pesky cords. Very hot.

How vindicated Jobs must feel, playing savior at the company that canned him back in 1985, dooming him to a drifting decade at his consolation-prize start-ups, NeXT and Pixar, while Apple plateaued and then sank under John Sculley and his successors. And how grateful the Mac faithful must be that the once erratic wunderkind is back in the saddle. "When Jobs returned to Apple," says Owen Linzmayer, author of the new insider history Apple Confidential (No Starch Press; $17.95), "he said he was only coming back as an adviser, and I thought, 'Good,' because the last time he was in charge, he, uh, wasn't the best manager. And then when he took over, I was like, 'Oh, God, what are we in for?'"

Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. In keeping with those archetypal imperatives, the mercurial Jobs seems to have returned from the wild a far more disciplined and effective executive, but his first moves still basically consisted of tearing the place apart--restocking the boardroom and labs with trusted NeXTers, ending the belated effort to build a market for Mac clones, spiking ancillary projects like the Newton palmtop and the Claris software subsidiary and replacing the bewildering tangle of product lines (raise your hand if you know the difference between the PowerBook 3400c/180 and the PowerBook 1400cs/166) with just four: the G3 desktop and laptop machines for the Mac-friendly publishing and graphics communities; the iMac desktop consumer machine; and the last pillar of Jobs' four-prong strategy, the consumer laptop iBook.

Who wrote the iBook? The project employed hundreds but had three primary authors: Jonathan Ive, the brilliant, soft-spoken V.P. of industrial design; senior V.P. of hardware engineering Jon Rubinstein; and, of course, Jobs himself, official purveyor of the vision thing, who delivered his basic concept in one pithy sentence: "The iBook is something you'd throw in your backpack."

From that single idea--a machine for the backpack, not the briefcase--a thousand developmental insights were launched. In this second Jobs era, says Ive, Apple products are designed "holistically," each aspect of development altering every other as the project evolves, the design group producing first sketches, then computer work-ups and finally physical prototypes in a perpetual rondelet with the software guys, Rubinstein's hardware jocks and Jobs, who was a continual presence during the iBook's 18-month gestation.

Take, for instance, these three givens: the iBook is wireless, it needs a full-size keyboard, and it must make sense for schools. From here the design implications topple like dominos. Both the wireless idea and the education focus demand long battery life, because what's the point of lugging a wireless into class if the machine is always asking to be plugged in? But being able to run for six hours (the length of a school day) demanded a large battery, which the full keyboard forced down to the machine's bottom lip. The design guys, meanwhile, had decided that the perfect latch was no latch at all, just a clamshell top that clicked securely shut, like a cell phone. The engineers by this point realized that the heavy battery made the bottom dense enough to handle the latchless top.

And so on. At their best (which, until the iMac, hasn't been all that often), Apple products dazzle by giving us what we didn't know we wanted but suddenly can't live without. This fall we'll learn whether America's been yearning for a blueberry laptop built of bulletproof polycarbonate plastic (to make it, Ive explains, "rugged, robust, structural") and co-molded rubber (to make it "compliant, yielding, human"). And a little foldout handle. And a sleep light that throbs like a heartbeat. And a sleek, round charger whose cord rolls up like a yo-yo...

To be sure, iBook's look hasn't garnered universal praise. Silicon Valley insiders, reports a wag, "can't decide whether it looks like a toilet seat or a Hello Kitty bag." But even its detractors would have to agree that it's a striking departure for the home-computer market--and quite possibly a landmark in the quest Jobs began when he founded Apple two decades ago. "I remember when he pulled the white sheet off the first Mac in '84," says Tim Bajarin, a longtime Apple watcher. "Even then, he was going to create the 'computer for Everyman.'"

But he didn't, not really, though Apple products from the Lisa to the LaserWriter have certainly pointed the way. Back when the first Macs were rolling out in the early '80s, the mass market Jobs was aiming for didn't yet exist--at least not at the prices he was charging. Since then, the operating-system wars--and years of bumbling management--have taken their toll on the company. By the time Microsoft's Windows captured the OS flag, the software community had largely stopped writing programs for the Mac--a leading indicator of Apple's long, slow and very painful decline.

Today, however, the software that matters most is online, where operating systems matter least. "No website," says Jobs, "knows whether it's a Mac or Windows on the other end of the line." In fact, for the home user who spends most of his computer time reading e-mail and browsing the Web, the plug-and-surf iMac is clearly a superior product--a fact vividly evidenced by the rise of Apple's consumer market share from 5% to a startling 12% in less than a year. In a little-noted but surely deliberate statement of purpose, Jobs devoted the bulk of last week's keynote to two Web initiatives: QuickTime TV, an ambitious soup-to-nuts solution for Web video, and Sherlock 2, the upgrade to Apple's zippy search engine. Even at 12%, Macintosh remains a minority, and therefore vulnerable, platform, but that computer for Everyman that Jobs has been reaching for seems closer to his grasp than it has been for a very long time.

And so, with its sights wisely fixed on cyberspace, Apple sails toward a brighter future with its interim CEO at the tiller. Even now, Jobs remains the great unknown as he shuttles in his beltless blue jeans between Pixar and Apple, spending serious time at the former only when there's a movie coming out or a Disney exec to be placated. "We're doubly blessed," says a Pixar employee of the company's volatile leader. "We get him when it's important, but most of the time he leaves us alone." Jobs is the first to admit that his role at the studio is less than hands on. "I don't direct the movies," he grins, making clear that that's precisely what he does in Cupertino. But he insists that this return engagement at the company he founded is just a temporary gig. A decade or two from now, he told TIME last week, "I will not be running Apple."

But no matter: for now, at least, the company is once again churning out cool products that the public is actually buying. Act III is under way. The prodigal son is home. And, against all odds, the Apple dream is alive. "Is it possible to fall in love with a computer?" asks Jeff Goldblum in a new TV ad Jobs screened last week for the adoring legions at MacWorld. Then, as a tangerine iBook dances and twirls onscreen, Goldblum answers his own question with an erotic, breathy groan: "Oh, yes!"

The place goes nuts, and Steve Jobs stands there beaming, a latter-day Moses who may yet manage to enter the promised land. --With reporting by Janice Maloney/San Francisco

With reporting by Janice Maloney/San Francisco