Word: ipodding
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Then Jonathan Ive, Apple's head of design--the Englishman who shaped the iMac and the iPod--squashed the case to less than half an inch thick and widened it to what looks like a bar of expensive chocolate wrapped in aluminum and stainless steel. The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, Platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone. Ive picks it up and points out four little nubbins on the back. "Your phone's got feet on," he says, not unkindly. "Why would anybody...
...these are quibbles. The fact is, the iPhone shatters two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices--such as an iPod and a phone--and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and they all--contrary to basic physics--occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking...
...course, Apple's other secret weapon is the controlling hand of Steve Jobs, 51, for whom this is an almost mystically significant year. It has been five years since the iPod launched, 30 years since Jobs co-founded Apple (with Stephen Wozniak) and 10 since he returned there after having been fired. In that decade, Apple's stock has gone up more than 1,500%. Neither age nor success--nor cancer surgery in 2004--has significantly mellowed him, although some of the silver in his beard is creeping up into his hair. All technologists believe their products are better than...
...person knocked down to size is a great American pastime. But there's no point in pretending that Jobs isn't special. A college dropout whose biological parents gave him up for adoption, Jobs has presided over four major game-changing product launches: the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod and the iPhone; five if you count the release of Pixar's Toy Story, which I'm inclined to. He's like Willy Wonka and Harry Potter rolled up into...
...special treatment from his phone-service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its technical infrastructure to handle the iPhone's unique voice-mail scheme. "They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen," says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple's iPod division. "They were infected by this product, and they were like, 'We've gotta do this...