(5 of 5)
Now Jobs thinks that same guy wants his iMac to play DVDs and edit digital videos. Jobs has a long history of divining the high-tech future, often recognizing it in technology other people invented: the mouse. The visual desktop. The laser printer. Rainbow-hued PCs. The wireless laptop. Now, years before most people have even heard of broadband Internet access, Jobs has bet the farm on the convergence of his two companies' products. Digital video, he proclaimed at the iMac launch last week, is "the next big thing."
He'd better hope so. Motorola's recent chip-shipping problems could cut Apple's third-quarter earnings 60% (from $203 million in profits to some $80 million), and have already triggered a plunge in Apple stock from 80 to the low 60s. But Jobs' keep-it-simple strategy--G3s and now G4s for pro users, iMacs and iBooks for the masses--has been so successful that some analysts see nothing but a buying opportunity. "This is not the old, incompetent, bungling Apple," says Warburg, Dillon Read's Wolf. "This is the new Apple. They have a great strategy, and they're making sensational products."
Will that be enough? Apple's 12% home-computer market share is a big improvement over 6%, but it still leaves the Mac on the margins--a minority desktop operating system at a time when desktop computers may be marginalized by the thousand portable "net appliances" looming on the horizon. If Jobs' crystal ball sees that far, he isn't telling. "He doesn't have a pocket Mac in the works, at least that I know of," says Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies Research International, a Silicon Valley consulting firm. "But he's too smart not to be thinking about it."
For now, though, the company is soaring, and you don't hear much about the search for a permanent Apple CEO. Quite the contrary: 20 years after his quest began, Jobs is still chasing his dream of giving soul to silicon. Both Apple and Pixar embody his vision of the computer as an empowering cultural force that can help heal a rift between art and technology that's as old as art and technology themselves. For his '60s-era peers, high tech meant the cold, gray establishment that they were revolting against. Jobs knew better. "Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist," he says. "Michelangelo knew how to cut stone at the quarry. Edwin Land at Polaroid once said, 'I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science,' and I've never forgotten that."
Indeed, Jobs, more clearly than any of his contemporaries, recognized the computer as a tool not for top-down corporate repression but for bottom-up individual empowerment and creativity, a lifelong article of faith to which Apple and Pixar today bear living tribute. Before launching into his evangelistic spiel from the Flint Center stage last week, Jobs briefly eulogized Sony founder Akio Morita, grandfather of the consumer-electronics industry, who had died just a few days earlier. "He expressed his love for the human species in every product he made," Jobs said in a clear, quiet voice. You get the feeling he couldn't imagine a better epitaph for himself. --With reporting by David S. Jackson/Los Angeles, Janice Maloney/San Francisco and Cathy Booth/Richmond
Read the full transcript of Michael Krantz's interview with Steve Jobs at time.com