SAN FRANCISCO -- Honesty time, OK? A year or two ago, you grudgingly accepted that it was time to grow up. You threw in the Mac towel, like a fraying security blanket, and got a Windows box.
You heard they were faster. Mr. Sensible-with-the-MBA told you they were "more dependable." Industry Herring 2.0 gave you the skinny from Cupertino, and the skinny wasn't good. You read that there were lots more [insert software addiction here] made for the Wintel platform. Maybe the support guy at work put his Doc Martenized foot down and told you he wouldn't coddle your special Mac needs anymore.
Or maybe, like Bartleby the Scrivener gazing determinedly at a brick wall, you refused to give in. None of your money going to the Evil Empire, thank you. You went out and bought a PowerPC. And when it bombed -- as it did 10 times a day -- you turned the volume down on the speaker, so all the guys playing 3-D games in the neighboring cubicles wouldn't hear that damned boot-up chord over and over.
Or maybe you're reading this on your new iMac. Welcome to the Internet, citizen! Fear not -- most of the natives are friendly. That blue color is cool, isn't it? It's called "Bondi blue."
In other words, Steve Jobs had his work cut out for him.
Moreover, he'd have his work cut out for him in this office. When I started at Wired Digital in 1995, we were an all-Mac team and proud of it. Now, it's 60-40 Windows. There's an iMac at reception and a passel of PC clones on the desks.
Sure, Apple's Q4 numbers were promising -- 800,000 iMacs shipped in four months -- but everyone knows it's going to take more than a few bouncy quarters for Apple to be winning again.
It's going to take a kind of alchemy to transform Apple from the Left Wing circa mid-1980s (i.e., you still do it because someone has to) to the kind of indisputably superior company that makes 15-year-old gaming wizards mutter "Cool!" when the box is unwrapped.
The good news is that Jobs' Macworld Expo keynote address on Tuesday gave the beleaguered community of long-time Mac partisans and Mac developers -- and the potentially infinite universe of new Mac buyers -- what we all need: a line of solid products that can't be beat at the benchmark level, look and feel great, with a totally new (not "revamped") company image that has upstart American poetry in it.
Steve Jobs: alchemist.
The iMac billboards say "Chic, Not Geek," but Jobs is too canny to depend on that as a business model. The genius of Jobs' turn-of-the-millennium vision for Apple is that it embraces both.
The new colors? Pure fizzy Japanese girl-pop chic -- and right at the historical moment when computers are being soaked up into the mainstream so quickly, the Box will no longer be able to foist its beige drabness into the fêng shui of the rooms it occupies.
The new swinging door? Vintage garage geek -- but right at the historical moment when swapping in a new graphics accelerator seems more like adding a component to a high-end stereo system than messing with the innards of a watch. Jobs knows that, in the new cultural landscape of high-tech for the masses, geeks and gamers play the same role that urban blacks and gays play in the worlds of fashion and music. If they think it's cool, the tipping-point mavens will think it's cool six months from now, and a year from then, it'll be all over the malls.
Put the blueberry and tangerine "iCandy" on the outside of the low-end boxes and the ass-throttling gaming chips in the heart of the flagship machines, and you've got buzz building from above and below, chic and geek.
Most of all, if you listen to the smartest people you can find who don't work for you -- and Apple's embrace of standards like OpenGL and their new affordable price points would indicate that they are listening -- you win.
Which is to say I walked into Jobs' address nursing the dour thought that I was probably going to have to buy a Windows machine after all to finally replace this buggy PowerBook.
Now I say: Stevie, anything up your sleeve in the portable department? I'll wait!
On my way out of Moscone Center, I thought I'd take a look into the future of Apple by asking those who'll be living in it -- the young wizards who are already building our networked world.
I asked Austin Shoemaker, 15, who built his school's homepage and launched his own ISP, what he thought of Jobs' keynote address.
"It was great," he said. "Apple is advancing so quickly to the next generation, I can buy a computer for US$3,000 that I would never have dreamed of for $100,000 last year."
Paul Hall, 18, who listened to the keynote speech over the Net, wished Jobs had made "more announcements about things that everybody knows Apple is working on but they won't admit" -- such as a next-generation portable called a "P1" he read about in a magazine.
Jeffrey Espinoza, a professional Mac repairman who is also 15, thinks that if Apple developed a palm-sized device that ran the Mac OS, it would be "ultimately cool."
Isaiah Miller, 10, wishes his Mac at home would "load a little quicker," and Ross Decker, 13, wants "more games" for the platform.
There was one gamer who was drawing a crowd with sleek maneuvers on a new G3 running Quake Arena on Mac OS X. The uniformed enemy -- a mess of exploding 3-D limbs and blood succumbing to one dead-eye shot and swift calculation after another -- didn't have a chance.
I asked the gamer, a soft-spoken 16-year-old named Becky who mops bathrooms for her school district, how many hours a week she spends playing Quake.
"Never played it before," she shrugged.
Like all the other kids I spoke to, however, she loves her Mac.
