Steven Levy: Apple Computer Is Dead; Long Live Apple

Apple Computer Incorporated is no more. On Jan. 9, CEO Steve Jobs announced that the name he and Steve Wozniak gave to their new business 30 years has changed. It will now be called simply Apple Inc. Jobs had deleted the word “computer” with the same ruthlessness that he once used to deny cursor keys to the original Macintosh, and an on/off switch to the iPod.

It was no coincidence that Jobs revealed this on the day that he unveiled the iPhone, Apple’s long-awaited entry into the mobile marketplace. The device further broadens the scope of the company once known primarily for making things with keyboards. It also enhances Apple’s legacy for swooping into a creatively moribund category and upending the established players with a level of style and innovation that has seemed beyond their grasp.

During Jobs’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday—a seamless two-hour infomercial that mesmerized 4,000 people, some of whom had waited all night for a seat—he promised three devices: a full-screen iPod, a smart phone and an Internet communicator. The iPhone, of course, is that complete trinity in one 4.8-ounce package, with the features of those three potentially disparate products superbly integrated. The look of the device is classic Apple: stunningly austere, with a lush 3.5-inch screen ringed in black and a single button underneath. There are also controls (for volume and ring-silencing) on its slim sides (less than half an inch thick), but they are almost imperceptible. The real controls are built into the software—task-appropriate buttons, switches, sliders, and scroll bars that appear on the high-density “multi-touch” screen, which has the intelligence to discern which touches are intentional and which are just random bumps. (This is in addition to a sensor that figures out if you’re holding the screen vertically or lengthwise, adjusting the orientation likewise, or another sensor that determines if the phone is being held to your ear, in which case the touch screen goes dormant so your cheek won’t accidentally switch your phone call to an iTunes movie.)

The screen allows for a range of digital (as in finger) inputs. You can tap on a virtual keyboard, double-tap on a movie to switch it from full-screen to wide-screen, swipe at a photo to move to the next one in the slide slow and pinch an image of a Web page to resize it for reading. Also, making use of the touchscreen, Apple has substantially improved the navigation abilities of the iPod, so much so that you almost don’t notice that the click wheel is missing. “It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made,” Jobs told me in a postkeynote interview and hands-on product demo. (Apple isn’t confirming, but I’d expect the rest of the iPod family to follow suit sometime later this year.)

At every turn, Apple’s engineers and design experts have attacked the problems of performing complicated tasks in the squinched-up environment of a handheld device, and turned awkward processes into delightful ones. The things you do with an iPhone are familiar to many mobile-device users—e-mail, photography, messages, music, even watching video. But Apple’s relentless focus on simplicity, efficiency, utility and fun makes the iPhone seem a different species than its competitor, something more personal, more approachable and, ultimately, more desirable than anything else out there. The best I can compare it to is the transformation that came when Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface in the computing world, and the cold environment of the digital world suddenly welcomed “the rest of us,” as Apple’s ads put it. Like previous Apple breakthroughs, though, the iPhone is pricey—depending on how much memory you get, either $499 or $599, along with a mandatory two-year contract for Cingular cell service. (And you’ll probably want an additional data service on top of that.) That’s a couple hundred bucks more than competitors.

The iPhone came about pretty much the same way that the iPod did five years ago—because earlier versions made by other companies really stunk, and Apple’s music-loving engineers and designers wanted a great player in their own pockets. In 2007, lots of people have issues with the current generation of smart phones, none so much as people who worked at Apple.