Zone Gadget

Even more than when he’s performing on stage, Steven P. Jobs’s passion for personal computing comes through when he talks about the years he spent cajoling his designers to build what he presented today as the world’s “thinnest” computer.

Along with David Pogue, the Times technology columnist, I spent a half-hour with Mr. Jobs after he introduced the MacBook Air this morning at the Macworld Expo. And as is frequently the case with Apple products, he pronounced the three-pound aluminum-clad portable to be one of the best things his company has ever designed.

“I’m going to be the first one in line to buy one of these,” he said. “I’ve been lusting after this.”

The company’s design team went through roughly 100 design prototypes to find the right form, he said. Both he and his lead designer, Jonathan Ive, were not certain that they would be able to fit the computer into the package that they came up with.

Earlier, during his keynote presentation, Mr. Jobs went to great lengths to extol the engineering effort that had gone into reducing the size of the basic computer to fit inside the computer, which tapers in thickness from .76 inch down to .16 inch. The circuit board is about the length of a pencil, he said, and he brought Intel’s chief executive, Paul S. Otellini, on stage to congratulate him for his company’s work in significantly shrinking the packaging of the Core 2 Duo microprocessor that the MacBook Air is based on.

Still, the machine is a reversal of field for Mr. Jobs, who in the past has insisted that less-than-full-featured laptops are undesirable. Today Mr. Jobs was unwilling to compare the MacBook Air to the original Dynabook vision, a portable prototype idea first conceived of by the computer scientist Alan Kay. He would go no further than asserting that this is the most elegant computer the company has created, right down to the four rubber footpads that support it.

Some of the competitors’ machines are so flimsy, he said, they require a fifth or even sixth pad to keep from sagging.

Mr. Jobs can be like that when he assesses the competition.

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”