Mr. Jobs, who refused comment for this article, has long turned conventional product announcements into part of the Apple mystique. Since his return to Apple in 1997, he has often unveiled new hardware and software while sitting at a computer keyboard much like a performing concert pianist in front of cheering crowds. “Steve might as well have invented the term ‘event marketing,’ ” said Stewart Alsop, a former Silicon Valley editor and conference promoter who is now a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates. “You focus everything on a moment in time and then persuade everyone to anticipate that moment.”
Apple’s marketing wizard has deftly used speculation about his next commercial move as an essential component of each new product introduction. The company’s customers spend countless hours chattering about whether the company’s next new portable computer will include the G5 chip or if an Apple cellphone or media center is just over the horizon. And while Mr. Jobs has fired and even sued his own employees in the past for leaking information, the first news about some Apple introduction has frequently appeared in a news account, on a Web site or, occasionally, in business newspapers in China or Taiwan where the company’s products are manufactured.
In the personal computer industry, where Mr. Jobs’s company still has a tiny market share, his ability to attract a disproportionate share of media attention has long irritated his competitors. Once, shortly after Mr. Jobs introduced a new version of his iMac consumer PC, his rival, Bill Gates of Microsoft, groused that Apple’s innovation was confined to colored plastic.
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