Ostensibly, Mr Jobs’s ambitions for the iPhone are modest. He expects 10m to be sold by the end of next year, about 1% of the world market for handsets. Apple has sold ten times as many iPods. But these numbers belie the significance of the iPhone – and Mr Jobs’s ambitions for it. Rather, it represents the latest step in the transformation of Apple, from a computer-maker to a consumer-electronics company, which Mr Jobs made official this year with the symbolic dropping of the word “Computer” from the firm’s name. His success in this transformation so far, and the expectation of a new phase thanks to the iPhone, explain why Apple, one decade after nearly collapsing, is now worth more than $100 billion and is to be included in America’s blue-chip elite, the Standard & Poor’s 100 index.
As a phenotype, the iPhone displays the best of Apple’s DNA in design and simplicity. Where other handsets are cluttered with mechanical buttons, the iPhone has exactly one. … At first glance, the iPhone appears to be an unusual device for Mr Jobs to launch. Tim Bajarin, who has covered Apple as an analyst since the early 1980s and runs Creative Strategies, a consultancy, says that Mr Jobs is usually attracted to devices that define new categories, rather than compete in large, pre-existing industries such as the handset business. But Mr Jobs knew that mobile phones were becoming music players, and thus rivals to the iPod, says Mr Bajarin, so entering the handset industry became a “defensive” imperative.
