Steve Jobs on the iMac Launch: Apple’s consumer comeback

Hi Bob. I'm good. Are you related to Judy? No, I wish I were. Got it. Just some quick questions for you on this launch of IMAX. I want to get a good sense from you exactly what this means to Apple. How much stock are you putting into this release of IMAX? Is this the make or break for your company as some analysts? You know, I don't know. I think it's really important for Apple. Apple wants to re-enter the consumer market, which Apple originally pioneered years ago, as you know. And I think IMAX is turning out to be a great product to do that with. So I think it's pretty important for us, yeah.

People say that Apple really needs to break back into the consumer area, which they've been falling down on in recent years. This is the big consumer product for Apple. Is this the one that they need? Yes, I think so. This is Apple's re-entry into the consumer market in a pretty big way. I think we've got a very strong product, a product that's much better than anything else out there. And we're going for it. You seem like you're hedging a little bit when you say it's a very strong product. Is it not everything that you had hoped it would be? Is it not quite what everyone's making it out to be? Oh, it's not what I hoped it'd be. It's more, actually. It came out better than I hoped. And, no, the product is killer. This company is generally an example of the father of this company.

Have we started yet? Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. You didn't tell me that. I thought we were just shooting the shit. You want to start again? Got it. Oh, you know, I decided probably about nine months ago that that wasn't my problem. So I stopped thinking about it, and I stopped worrying about it. And other people may worry about it, but I don't worry about it.

I just focus on what I'm doing right now, which is trying to get the IMAC launched and trying to make as many as we can. Well, we're making tons of them. And whether that's going to be enough, I don't know. But we've got factories around the world making them, so we're going to have a lot of supply. We have tens of thousands on dealer shelves for the launch tomorrow. And so we're making a hefty quantity of them, and it may or may not be enough. The demand seems to be pretty strong out there, so we'll have to see. Oh, yeah. Well, I think what IMAC was designed to do was to do for the Internet what the original Macintosh did for personal computing, which was to make it easy.

And, you know, the IMAC is an amazing piece of technology. I don't know if you know this, but the IMAC is faster. The IMAC at $1,299 is faster than the fastest PC you can buy for any amount of money. You can spend $5,000 on a Compaq with a 400 MHz Pentium II in it, and an IMAC is faster at $1,299. So it's an amazing computer, and yet its greatest power, I think, is that you can take it home, take it out of the box, and be cruising the Internet within 10 minutes. And that's not something you can do on any other computer we know of. So we think the IMAC is pretty special, not only for Apple's installed base. Of Apple's 25 million users, 10 million of them are in homes.

But in addition to that, the analysts are saying there's 5 to 10 million new users that are going to enter the market this year, and their primary reason is to get onto the Internet. And so those are the kind of people we think IMAC is the perfect computer for. You know, we hear the opposite from customers. We hear that a lot of the consumer PCs on the market are kind of last year's oatmeal, and they want something a lot better than that. Well, you know, I'm not the one to judge that. We're just doing the best we can to come up with some really great products and tell the world about them, and we'll find out what the demand is. But I think this is going to be a very strong product for Apple.

Yeah. You know, I think, well, you've seen most computers. You know what they look like, right? You don't want to have to hide them when company comes. So we wanted to do something that was really different than that and really was fun and really was great design. And so we looked to all sorts of, you know, resources to find ideas and feelings about what we wanted to capture. You know, because we wanted to have more fun. And I think the IMACs turned out, it's really fun. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

You know, actually, we got a lot of research that says maybe 15% or so of the people out there use floppies. They're going away pretty fast. You know, software used to come on floppies, but now it all comes on CD-ROMs, right? So that was one of the biggest uses for a floppy that's obsolete. The second thing was people used to back up their hard disks with floppies, but it's pretty hard to back up a 4-gigabyte hard disk with floppies. You'd need 4,000 of them, and nobody does that anymore. And the third is the, you know, sort of what we call sneaker net, and most people are using the Internet for that now. So the floppy is fading away, and generally the people that want removable storage are buying ZIP drives or Imation Super Drives and things like that, which hold 100 megabytes or more. And all of those things are available for the iMac.

You can just plug them right in. So I think people have a much greater choice of what they want, and they can get the storage device that fits really what they want, if indeed they need one at all, and we think most people won't. Oh, you know, I think we released earlier this week that we'd received 150,000 preorders in the first week of accepting orders, and, you know, we don't usually release that kind of information, so I think we'll just stick with that for now. Oh, you know, actually, there's been a complete turnaround in that. It's been amazing. You know, with Apple, I think, doing much better, and with the launch of the iMac, there have been 460 new applications for Macintosh announced since we launched the iMac on May 6th. So the developers are coming back in droves.

There's some incredibly great software coming out for the Mac now. Oh, absolutely. Well, you know, as you know, the Universal Serial Bus is the new standard not just for Apple but for the whole PC industry for how to connect peripherals, and every peripheral out there is going towards the Universal Serial Bus. So as an example, Epson printers are already out there in the marketplace. Hewlett-Packard ships their printers within a few weeks. There's going to be plenty of stuff out there. There's, I think, about almost 40 devices announced for the iMac, everything from printers to scanners to, you know, digital cameras. Kodak's digital cameras are already out there, et cetera.

There's a lot of stuff out there. Well, you know, it's nicer than what they were saying about Apple a year ago, isn't it? Well, you know, again, of Apple's 25 million-unit installed base, 10 million of those are in homes, and clearly we're going after that part of Apple's installed base. But as I mentioned, between 5 and 10 million new users are expected to enter the industry this year with their number one goal to be to get on the Internet. And we think iMac is perfect for that. We think it's going to be one of the best devices in the world. We think it's going to be one of the best devices in the world. We think it's going to be one of the best devices in the world. We think iMac is perfect for them. And then also, you know, Apple has lost a lot of customers to Wintel over the last five years, and we think iMac is going to give a pretty good reason for a lot of those to come home back to Mac.

So I think we're going after several different sets of customers, and collectively, you know, maybe it'll be a pretty big number. Who knows? Give me a sense of your marketing campaign on this. It's an unprecedented amount of money being spent on it. Well, you know, as you know, all great marketing starts with a great product, and we think we've got one here, so we want to tell the world about it. And we've got some great TV ads that break this Sunday on Wonderful World of Disney, and it'll be running for the next several weeks. We've got a great outdoor campaign that's going up. Some wonderful photos of the iMac, and the slogans are, I think, therefore, iMac, chic, not geek, sorry, no beige, and mental floss. And then we have a 12-page insert, which is going to be distributed in Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, People magazine, and other consumer magazines this coming Monday.

So you might want to check that out as well. Are you as excited about this as you were about Macintosh? Yeah. Yeah, I think we've got something really great here. Well, you know, I think for Apple to come from where it did a year ago to people debating how far ahead of the rest of the market Apple is, isn't so bad in a year. Alright, well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Jobs. Bye-bye. Alright, I'm going to put this stuff in. I just need some real enthusiasm. Right.