Transatlantic Cable: The cult of Jobs

There are three things that you need to succeed in Silicon Valley: a broad white-toothed smile, a loud voice and the ability to make everybody think you know what you are talking about.

Steve Jobs has all of these skills, and all were in full effect for a meeting of the Mac faithful at the Seybold Seminars 'Publishing in the 21st Century' conference in San Francisco late last month. You've probably seen some of the coverage of it it was the one where he unveiled the new G4 Mac to rapturous applause. Unsurprisingly, the hall was packed, and Jobs managed to wow them with a string of good news, new products and one-liners.

All this was lapped up by the Mac-friendly crowd - it's just about the only time I've seen people whistling and giving a standing ovation when the curtain finally drops on the new machine.

Mind you, Jobs had plenty to be happy about. Apple now has about $3bn cash in the bank, it's been making a profit for the last seven quarters and been selling every iMac that it can make. Jobs claimed that the company ended the last quarter with only 15 hours worth of inventory in its factories.

But when you look a bit closer, you find a few things aren't quite as they seem.

For instance, Jobs claimed that one model of the new G4 is "shipping now", but if you look on the Apple online store, it quotes a delivery time of 10 days. This model apparently had the internal Apple codename of 'Yikes!' because Jobs decided he wanted to announce the new model now, and they had to scramble to come up with a product that could be shipped that quickly.

Hardly earth shattering, but obviously 'now' doesn't mean quite the same thing for Jobs as it does for the rest of us. No wonder the Mac Web site 'As the Mac Turns' (at http://209.142.226.140/infoXczar/atat/ ) asked: "Has Steve's infamous Reality Distortion Field (tm) worn off yet? Because, you know, it was running full blast during Tuesday's Seybold keynote address..."

What's truth got to do with it?

It's also worth taking a closer look at the specs of the new machines. In particular, the lower-end model that Jobs described as "shipping now". It has some new features (such as the speedy new G4 processor), but otherwise it's a blue-and-white G3 with a new paint job. Only the faster models (which aren't shipping for 30 to 60 days) have the new motherboard (with the Apple codename 'Sawtooth'), and they're not available yet, even when you look through the Reality Distortion Field (tm)...

Other cynical bastards (like me) have pointed out that the demos Jobs ran during the talk (which, unsurprisingly, proved that the G4 is about 2.9 times faster than a Pentium) were on the G4-enhanced version of Photoshop 5.5 - programs that haven't been rewritten for the G4 won't be much faster. Plus Apple's notorious paranoia about revealing new products means that many software companies are only now looking at enhancing their products to go faster on the G4. There is no doubting that the G4 is a beast of a machine, but whether it's worth throwing out your old G3 remains to be seen.

Of course, Jobs isn't actually lying when he say these things - he's just doing the usual Silicon Valley thing of, well, putting a spin on things. And he's certainly not the only one to do it, although he is one of the masters. You would expect nothing less from the man who came up with phrases like "insanely great" and "think different".

Which reminds me. The other big news at Apple is that the beard is back. Although all of Apple's promotional pictures show a clean-shaven Steve Jobs, he is now sporting a full beard...