In an article for the New York Times, John Markoff explains how Apple has learned from its past to use the iPod to reclaim some of the personal computer market:

STROLL the corridors and the atriums on Apple Computer's corporate campus these days and you will notice that something is missing. Gone are the posters and graphics accenting the company's sleek personal computers. In their place, in the main lobby, is a striking, three-story-high billboard celebrating Steven P. Jobs's brand-new billion-dollar consumer electronics business -- the iPod digital MP3 music player.

In just two and a half years, Mr. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has managed to take a well-designed hand-held gadget, add software connecting it to Macintoshes and Windows-based personal computers and convince the recording industry that he has found an elegant solution for ending its nightmare of digital piracy. In doing so, he has shifted the emphasis of Apple from what made it famous -- hip, even lovable computers -- to what he hopes will keep it relevant and profitable in the future: products for a digital way of life.

In fact, the wild success that Mr. Jobs has enjoyed with the iPod may have come in the nick of time. For all the acknowledged design and ease-of-use advantages of the Macintosh, Apple's overall PC business is still growing more slowly than that of its Microsoft- and Intel-based competitors.

Moreover, it was obvious at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January that a horde of consumer goods and computing companies is preparing a fresh assault aimed at bringing computerized gadgets into every nook and cranny of the home. In particular, two powerful Apple rivals, Sony and Microsoft, are betting that Mr. Jobs is wrong when he says, "It's about the music!" This year, both companies plan to release more expensive, hand-held combination video and audio players that their executives hope will blow the iPod away.

So will Apple eventually be overwhelmed by its bigger, better-heeled competitors? Throughout the technology world, there seems to be a simple, uniform answer to that question: Never underestimate Steve Jobs.

With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.

AND, helped by his growing prominence in Hollywood through his second company, Pixar Animation Studios, Mr. Jobs has attained a level of influence over how life is lived in the digital age that is unmatched by even his most powerful computer industry rivals. "He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era," said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.

Since returning seven years ago to Apple, the computer maker he helped to establish in 1976, Mr. Jobs has created a fusion of fashion, brand, industrial design and computing. He has opened a chain of 78 retail stores to showcase Apple's consumer-oriented designs and to surround the company's computers with an array of digital consumer products. The stores themselves have become another billion-dollar business, a feat all the more impressive considering that one of Apple's chief competitors, Gateway, failed with a similar retail strategy during the same period.

As a result, Apple is acting less like a computer company and more like brand-brandishing, multinational companies such as Nike and Virgin. The iPod's success is also the clearest indication that Mr. Jobs, if he is to successfully revamp Apple, will ultimately win not by taking on PC rivals directly, but by changing the rules of the game.

The Apple that is starting to emerge may be a harbinger. The company's growth may no longer be defined by its PC market share, now a declining sliver of the PC industry, but instead by Mr. Jobs's ability to create consumer markets.

Mr. Jobs, who says he has a 70 percent share of the market for legal music downloads and a 45 percent share of the MP3 market, sees the shift as sweet vindication. "We're getting a chance to see what Apple engineering and Apple design can really do once we get out from underneath the 5 percent Macintosh operating system share," he said.

To some people in the industry, Mr. Jobs, of late, has even outshone his old nemesis, Bill Gates of Microsoft -- not in market share, of course, but in innovation. "Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs arrived with the idea of digitizing the world, but Gates has lost his way," said George F. Colony, the chief executive of Forrester Research, a computer industry consulting firm. "Despite all of his warts, Jobs has kept the dream alive, whether it's movies, music or photos. I call him the digitizer."

Two striking figures in Apple's most recent quarterly financial results, announced on April 14, underscore Mr. Jobs's new approach. In the last three months, Apple sold 807,000 iPods, surpassing for the first time the number of Macintosh computers it sold (749,000). At the same time, revenue for products other than Macintoshes reached 39 percent of the total of $1.91 billion for the quarter, more than double the percentage two years ago.

"It's fascinating that the company is morphing into something else," said Charles R. Wolf, a Wall Street analyst at Needham & Company, adding, "Jobs is absolutely brilliant in understanding consumer products."

In fact, throughout his career, Mr. Jobs has been notable as much for the products he has resisted selling as for the ones he has pursued. During the mid-80's, after his falling-out with John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive he hired in 1983 to run Apple, Mr. Jobs resisted repeated proposals from young Macintosh engineers to join them in efforts to create hand-held digital devices that would ultimately become the Newton and General Magic projects. It would be a wise decision, for both Newton, the personal digital assistant, and General Magic, a similar hand-held computer, proved to be ahead of their time, and neither led to successful consumer products.

Several years ago, Mr. Jobs said in an interview last week, the company was ready to introduce Apple-branded Internet service. Two weeks before the launch he killed the idea because he had decided it wasn't a viable business.

More recently, Mr. Jobs has been publicly skeptical about tablet computers and hand-held video players. And executives familiar with the history of the iPod design effort said that he initially was not in favor of making the iPod compatible with Windows-based computers. Obviously, he came around -- and, as a result, the company will probably never be the same.

People who know Mr. Jobs well say he disdains strategic thinking as it is practiced by large corporations. Several people who have worked with him describe his business approach as "instinctual."

Underscoring that point, when he returned to Apple in 1997, Mr. Jobs contacted every consulting firm that had major contracts with Apple, according to a person familiar with the events. One by one, he called in the firms' directors, asked for a review of their work, thanked them and then told them their services would no longer be needed.

It has become apparent that the way Mr. Jobs designs products has changed fundamentally during his second tour of duty. In creating the iPod, the iTunes Macintosh and Windows software and the iTunes music store, Apple has not just designed products; it has also designed a business system. That may help explain why, almost three years into Mr. Jobs's foray into digital music, his major competitors are still playing catch-up, or, as in the case of Hewlett-Packard and Time Warner, have decided to ally with him.

Mr. Jobs's recent approach to product development is a radical change from the past. He once said his goal was to become an "industrialist." In his early years at Apple and at Next, the computer company he founded after he left Apple in 1985, he spent much time leading development efforts with hardware and software. In both cases, he built automated factories in Silicon Valley.

BY contrast, Apple says it developed the iPod in just six months, faster than any major product in the company's history. The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together starting in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked at the Apple spinoff General Magic, at Philips Electronics and briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.

In the late 1990's, Mr. Fadell tried to start his own Silicon Valley company, Fuse, designing consumer electronics products, including some related to digital music. When Fuse failed to get financing, he went to Apple, first as a contractor in February 2001, and then in April that year as the senior director of the iPod and other special projects.

He would eventually build a 35-member team of engineers from Apple and other companies. Using a version of a microprocessor that powers most cellphones, the group brought the iPod together rapidly by relying on software licensed from a small start-up, Pixo, a cellphone software company founded by Paul Mercer, another former Apple engineer.

Since Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he has increasingly insisted that the company speak with just the voices of top executives, so Mr. Fadell was not permitted to comment for this article. But Mr. Fadell's decision to go to Apple instead of staying at RealNetworks may come to be regarded as a turning point in the digital music battle.

RealNetworks had been trying to develop consumer electronics products based on the company's RealPlayer software program. Mr. Fadell, however, lasted only six weeks at the company because, his friends said, he did not see eye to eye with Mr. Glaser, the chief executive. As a result, several former Apple employees suggested, Mr. Glaser might have allowed an iPod-like hit product to slip through his fingers.

Despite iPod's success, skeptics say Mr. Jobs's digital music venture will not be enough to offset a flagging performance in the PC business. "The success of the iPod doesn't seem to have significantly changed Apple's market share," said T. Michael Nevens, a director at both Borland Software and Broadvision and the former director of McKinsey & Company's technology consulting practice. And Mr. Nevens said that there was "no support for the theory" that the new digital appliances would bolster computer sales.

Mr. Jobs, however, does not appear to be banking on that happening. Instead, he is betting on his ability to rapidly replicate the iPod's success by creating a string of digital consumer product categories.

In Silicon Valley, where speculation about what Mr. Jobs may do next is a favorite spectator sport, the betting is that the company is preparing to introduce such an effort in July at its World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

WHAT new products will be unveiled? No one outside this famously secretive company may know for sure. But because Mr. Jobs has been so publicly critical of tablet computers and hand-held video players, some outsiders have suggested that Apple may choose to offer a Macintosh-style interactive television system for the living room, competing with Media Center PC's, designed by Microsoft and Intel, and with the PSX video game and digital video recorder, soon to be released by Sony.

But another avenue is more likely, according to several people close to the company. Mr. Jobs is legendary for being idiosyncratic and unwilling to follow industry trends. Wouldn't Apple's co-founder want to avoid the crowded market for digital entertainment products, they suggest, and turn his laser focus on a mobile digital communications product?

Last year, the company quietly added two new wireless standards, known as 3GPP and 3GPP2, to its QuickTime software for sending and receiving multimedia over digital cellular networks. Because Apple was an early leader in the Wi-Fi market with its airport wireless networking base station, the reasoning goes, the company may be hard at work on a line of digital mobile phones that would take the company into the fast-growing voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VoIP market.

But if that is Apple's strategy, Mr. Jobs isn't saying. After all, surprise is at the heart of all the company's marketing campaigns, and who would expect less from the man who once rented San Francisco's symphony hall to introduce a new computer? Even for Mr. Jobs and Apple, some things remain the same.

"Don's Call it a Store, Call It an Ad With Walls"

In an article for the New York Times, Stuart Elliott describes a trend popularized by Apple and its retail locations, one of the principle sites of iPod distribution, to create emotional connections with coustomers:

STEVEN GILLIATT, president of G2 Worldwide, a leading brand development and design consulting company in New York, recently had an up-close-and-personal demonstration of the increasing power of eye appeal in retailing.

"I was buying an iPod a couple weeks ago and there was a feeding frenzy at the store," Mr. Gilliatt said, referring to the Apple Store in SoHo, where customers jostled one another to buy the special edition iPod loaded with music by the rock group U2. "I was there as a civilian, but I'd been converted from consideration to purchase," he said, borrowing jargon from marketing mavens.

Mr. Gilliatt's response to the innovative design of the Apple Store -- so cool it is now being described as a "singles mecca" in The New York Post -- indicates the importance of intangible elements in selling goods ranging from apparel and personal-care products to entertainment merchandise and housewares. The product's design, the packaging and even the style of the store are now weapons in the marketing arsenal, as much as traditional tactics like television commercials and print advertisements.

"There's a lot of competition out there, and everyone needs to be differentiated," said Erik Ulfers, senior vice president for environmental design at Jack Morton Worldwide in New York, which specializes in what it calls "experiential communications," which range from the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center to the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Athens.

The goal is to generate "an emotional moment between a consumer and a brand," Mr. Ulfers said, adding: "It sounds a little goofy, a little abstract, if you talk about it too much. The big challenge is to dimensionalize the aspects of a brand -- what a brand is, who it wants to be -- and use the visuals to support the story about that brand you want to tell."

Eye appeal has become more crucial in the last five years, said Jim Lucas, director for planning and research at Draft in Chicago, a direct marketing agency, part of what he termed the "popularization of design," or "design for the masses," brought to life by name-brand designers like Michael Graves and Philippe Starck for retailers like Target.

"What has started to happen as a result," Mr. Lucas added, "is that people have come to expect a certain level of design from their products than before," citing iPod's success and the Mini Cooper.

"Design works at different levels, not just on functionality," Mr. Lucas said. "It also works at a visceral level, as the color, the shape, attract one's attention, not just as eye candy but in a more reflective, associative way."

The store itself is now "one of the key elements of the marketing mix," Mr. Lucas said, as retailers like Wal-Mart seize more power from the manufacturers who once had the upper hand by running advertising that drove customers into stores.

"Retailers now are the choice editors, whereas in the past the manufacturers were," he added, naming chains like H&M, Ikea and Pottery Barn. As a result, a store's environment is acquiring an importance once reserved for, say, the script of a commercial to be run during the Super Bowl.

"The outside is the new inside," said Peter Arnell, chairman and chief executive of the Arnell Group in New York, an advertising agency that has branched into design. "It's all about sensory experience. The retail theater closes the deal," said Mr. Arnell, who once studied architecture with Mr. Graves.

For one advertising client, Reebok International, the Arnell Group designed a flagship store in Philadelphia meant to personify the company's new Rbk footwear and apparel line by converting, as Mr. Arnell put it, "the beats and rhythms of sports into a three-story retail space."

And Jacob Arabo, a k a Jacob the Jeweler, the purveyor of bling-bling to the hip-hop aristocracy, is getting an Arnell Group design for his first store, at 48 East 57th Street in Manhattan, which is intended to invoke the interior of a gem mine.

For the Sharp Corporation, the Wieden & Kennedy agency in Portland, Ore., sought to offer consumers a three-dimensional version of a global brand campaign for Sharp's Aquos liquid-crystal-display television sets. So the agency conceived the Aquos Project, a public gallery that is open through Dec. 24 at 137 Wooster Street in SoHo in Manhattan.

The gallery, managed by Lime Public Relations and Promotion in New York, features the works of an artist, Kenzo Minami, and a design studio, Tronic, which are partly displayed on -- of course -- Aquos televisions.

"It comes down to a membership program, if you will," Mr. Ulfers of Morton Worldwide said, "making a brand's constituency feel like members with a sense of inclusion."

For all the interest in eye appeal, conventional advertising "is not going to go away, certainly not in our lifetimes," Mr. Gilliatt of G2 said, because it is "important for getting people in the store."

Still, "marketers are recognizing there's a huge opportunity," he added, "for making design, packaging, lighting, display and other in-store elements, work harder at the point of purchase to create emotional connections, so all our contacts with the consumer are more focused and powerful."

"Let's put it this way," Mr. Gilliatt said, "in the Apple Store, there was a lot of emotional connecting going on."

Both articles can be found on Lexis Nexis Academic by searching for iPod design in articles from the past two years.

Tim Mattran