Hello Again

LOOK AT THAT!'' SAYS STEVE JOBS as he pulls his Mercedes into a parking space. He's pointing at a new Volkswagen Beetle, and as soon as he parks, he dashes over, circling the shiny black Bug, taking the measure of a well-publicized update of once great product design. ""They got it right,'' he concludes.

Last Wednesday Jobs himself received a more thunderous thumbs-up at the announcement of Apple Computer's successor to its own hall-of-fame classic, the original Macintosh: a machine designed for consumers dubbed the iMac (only Apple would dare to lowercase the ""I'' in Internet). The crowd in Cupertino, Calif.'s Flint Center--site of the historic Mac launch 14 years ago--largely consisted of Apple employees. But due to an industrial-strength cone of silence shrouding the new product, few had been aware of its existence. So after a morale-boosting slide show documenting the company's new profits, and a demonstration of the speed of its sleek new laptops, the crowd went bonkers when interim CEO Jobs, in a rare appearance in a business suit, literally unveiled a piece of hardware that blends sci-fi shimmer with the kitsch whimsy of a cocktail umbrella. As distinctively curvy as the Beetle, dressed in retro-geeky, translucent plastic, the iMac (due to ship in August) is not only the coolest-looking computer introduced in years, but a chest-thumping statement that Silicon Valley's original dream company is no longer somnambulant.

Ten months ago, when 43-year-old Jobs temporarily assumed control of the company he cofounded in a garage in 1977, the move was widely seen as a last-ditch effort to inject excitement into a barely breathing corporate husk. Maybe Jobs could weave his famous ""reality-distortion field'' and preserve enough interest for some bigger entity to snap Apple up at a face-saving price. But now strange words are emerging from One Infinite Loop, the glass-atriumed Cupertino headquarters. Words like profit. Stability. And even, if you strain to hear, growth. For the first time in years the face icon appearing on the Mac boot-up screen has a reason to smile.

How bad were things at Apple a year ago? ""This company was in a death spiral,'' says chief financial officer Fred Anderson. The CEO was Gil Amelio, a semiconductor executive who had cut some costs and reintroduced the idea of product quality, but really had as much business running Apple as Bob Dole. It wasn't just that Amelio was a structurehead who couldn't relate to Apple's notorious freewheeling culture--he couldn't articulate how Apple fit into the present, let alone the future. Check out the index of his recent excuse-laden book and you will not find an entry for ""Internet.'' When Ed Woolard, the former DuPont chairman who'd recently joined Apple's board, called Amelio last Independence Day weekend to set him free, the company was deep in the red, morale was nonexistent and even die-hard Mac fanatics were cracking open copies of ""Windows for Dummies.''

Enter Steve Jobs, who had been advising Amelio since Apple had purchased NeXT, Jobs's software company, late in 1996. Jobs's main gig, heading animation studio Pixar, was finally paying off after a 10-year ramp-up: in the wake of megahit ""Toy Story,'' Jobs's stock holdings made him a billionaire. His financial stake in Apple, though, consisted of a single share of stock. In addition, he had a young family he loved spending time with. So why take up Woolard's offer to temporarily run the company?

Jobs explains that his ""reluctant'' acceptance of the task was tied to his belief that ""the world would be a slightly better place with Apple Computer.'' Some of his friends, however, think that his motivation was more intensely personal. ""No matter how famous Pixar becomes, Steve is known for Apple; if Apple is tarnished, Steve is tarnished,'' says former Apple exec Heidi Roizen. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle who accepted Jobs's offer of a board seat, adds, ""Apple is like a child who has a drug problem--Steve has come back to straighten her out.''