Armani, Andy And Apple

Steve Jobs and New York's SoHo district are a natural fit. Both are icons in the nexus where taste, art and commerce all meet. Like SoHo, Apple CEO Jobs has evolved from scruffy beginnings to prosperity while maintaining a quietly hip edge.

So it's no wonder that when Apple opened its first store in New York City, Jobs chose the place where Giorgio Armani and the Keith Haring shop

coexist. At its unveiling last Wednesday, Jobs was greeting media and muck-a-mucks at his 32d Apple retail store, a former Restoration Hardware outlet in a 100-year-old former post office. "I love the neighborhood," Jobs gushes.

Jobs is celebrating five years since his triumphant return to the company. He's still triumphant and, surprising even himself, he's still there. And he's still foiling skeptics by insisting--and, so far, proving--that Apple is a survivor. Earlier in the day, dressed in trademark long-sleeved black T and jeans, he wove his spell before thousands of the faithful who attended the semiannual Macworld Expo. There were no big surprises in the nearly two-hour presentation, but an abundance of encouraging updates and intriguing new additions to the Mac selection. A new version of the desk-lamp-like iMac sports an impressive 17-inch screen. The iPod music player was downpriced and upgraded, and Jobs announced a Windows version. Jobs spent a lot of time on Jaguar, the update to OS X, which includes improved mail, calendar and search programs.

Almost lost in the blizzard of announcements was the introduction of Rendezvous, software that instantly links people in wireless networks. For instance, when several people who have laptops equipped with iTunes music software gather together, a superlibrary instantly forms, combining all the songs on everybody's computer. Normally, such an advance would be news in itself, but in Apple's high-powered innovation factory, it's just one more spoke in the "digital hub" that supposedly makes Macintosh a platform that will lure "switchers" from the dominant Windows system.

Not that it's an easy road for Apple, which earlier in the week was reporting drab financial results. Jobs blames the economy. "I'd rather be us than some of the other guys out there," he says. "It's only us and Dell making money [among computermakers]. They're making money because they're Wal-Mart, we're making it because we're innovating." Jobs also shrugs off fears that Microsoft, expressing unhappiness at sales of its Mac version of Office, might abandon the platform. "It's just a spat," he says, predicting that new versions of Office will keep appearing on the Mac.