Business Insight Zone

Steven Spielberg has said that one of his earliest motivations to make movies was to make his sisters jump, which he did with his early 8mm films. I suspect something similar drives Steve Jobs, because he sure seems to relish that moments of jaws-dropped gaping that follow his “Oh by the way” comments and “One more thing” announcements during his Apple product presentations.

Here’s a link to a liveblog account of Jobs’s latest presentation, which wrapped up about an hour ago:

The Mac Observer: San Francisco - Live Coverage of Apple Special Event

A choice excerpt — all consecutive posts — showing how Jobs builds the suspense to wow and re-wow the crowd:

[1:25 PM] “The iPod has kind of a funny name. It was just called the iPod, because it was the first one. We didn’t add a suffix to it.” It will now be called “iPod classic.” The new unit will be 80GB, and even thinner than the old 30GB unit. Audio is 30 hours and video is 5 hours. It will use the same interface as the nano.
[1:26 PM] Another unit will be 160GB!
[1:27 PM] Can hold 40,000 songs. Steve called that amazing. 40 hours of audio playback and 7 hours of video playback. That’s impressive. The 80 GB unit will be $249. The 160 GB will be $349. The audience is applauding.
[1:28 PM] The new iPod classic will also be in stores this weekend. It has an all-metal body, BTW.
[1:29 PM] “But, we’re not done yet.” Talking about the iPhone, and how he called it the best iPod ever. “People have been asking us when we’re going to bring this technology to the iPod. The answer is today.” It’s called the iPod touch.
[1:29 PM] It’s 8mm thin. He said “we think it’s one of the 7 wonders of the world.” It basically has the same interface as the iPhone’s iPod interface.
[1:32 PM] Full screen interface, of course. Landscape viewing. Same home button on the bottom of the unit. It has the same slide-to-unlock feature as the iPhone.
[1:32 PM] Steve is demonstrating the unit. We’ve seen photos and music, moving on to videos.
[1:36 PM] “But, there’s more.” Aha, the iPod touch has WiFi built into it, 802.11 b/g.
[1:37 PM] Clearly the touch is going to have Safari, too.
[1:38 PM] He’s talking about other devices with WiFi couldn’t navigate login screens. So, it will indeed have Safari. It’s like I’m Nostradamus, or something.
[1:39 PM] There are still a couple of blank spots in the icons for the iPod touch on the display. Ah, another one will be YouTube, just like the iPhone.
[1:42 PM] Steve is demoing Safari now. Cruising a newspaper Web site. Using Google Search now. Looking at Facebook.
[1:43 PM] The darn thing is pretty cool, and is going to be a mega hit. It’s worlds ahead of anything else, IMNHO.

Jobs has the pacing of a showman, which is well matched to his obsession with product designs that go beyond “smart” to push the Coooool!!! buttons of Apple’s customers and would-be customers.