A decade ago I traveled to San Francisco for Canadian Business to take in the launch of Apple’s newest device at the time, the iPad. From the February 2010 issue of Canadian Business, here was my take on Steve Jobs the Magician:
It’s a mild January morning in San Francisco, and the circus has come to town. Outside the Yerba Buena Arts Center, a mob has gathered to witness the unveiling of Apple’s latest creation, a handheld computer that all the world will soon know as the iPad. Network TV crews have set up camp, their satellite dishes pointed skyward. A crush of reporters and bloggers jostle past burly security guards like kids pushing their way into a rock concert. Even after the doors close and Apple’s turtlenecked CEO, Steve Jobs, launches into what is arguably the most important presentation of his life, outside, the people keep coming.
Rafael Fischmann, a tech blogger from Brazil, travelled 18 hours just to be close to the event, “because something very big and revolutionary is coming.” Dr. Bernd Weidner, a Berlin physicist in town for a major photonics conference taking place across the street, is thrilled just to find himself in San Francisco “at this moment in history.” In fact, throughout the morning several groups of photonics experts, people who study the very building blocks of light, converge on the Apple event like moths to a torch. “This is going to be a game changer,” predicts Conor Evans, an instructor at Harvard University and an avid Apple fan.
Finally Raghavan Rajagopalan, a St. Louis — based medical researcher who’s been listening to others heap praise on Apple, cuts in. “I don’t get it,” he says simply. “There are thousands of products [at the photonics conference] to help cure cancer, amazing research into all kinds of things. But the whole world is over here watching Apple bring out some little device.”
Welcome to the $200-billion Steve Jobs magical mystery extravaganza. Jobs the Magnificent is the act everyone has come to see. It’s not always easy to articulate exactly how Jobs is able to wield such uncanny power over the consumer imagination, but the launch of the iPad provided some of the clearest examples of his unmatched, some might say mystical, powers.