Smash hit

But the true apotheosis of Jobs and Ive happened in 2001. The operating-system software was radically improved, Ive had made his switch to modernism and the iPod was introduced, a product that suddenly turned Apple into a big music company with a small computer operation attached. In business terms, Apple was a player again; and in artistic terms, it had joined the pantheon.

For fear you will think, possibly correctly, that my rediscovered faith has driven me mad, I will not wax too lyrical about Ive’s current designs. I will only say that I know of no product, the most refined cars included, that comes close to attaining their strangely glowing celebration of their functionality. Other products — Issey Miyake’s clothes, say — are just as great works of art, but only Apple brings this level of aesthetic excellence to the mass market, and it does so within the demanding technical confines of the electronics involved.

Okay, it’s art, it’s culture, so what’s it all about? Art for art’s sake is never quite the whole story; there is always context. The answer, I think, lies in the true nature of the Jobs-Ive perfectionism. Ive is 39 and Jobs is 51. The first is a Generation X-er for whom technology is as natural as breathing; the second is a baby-boomer for whom it is an exciting anti- authoritarian adventure. Somewhere in Jobs’s imagination will be Nasa’s breathtaking Saturn V rockets; somewhere in Ive’s will be William Gibson’s Neuromancer, with its cyberpunk visions of the super-integration of the human and the machine. Jobs’s control freakery and technophilia find expression in Ive’s dreams of integration.

Apple’s key technical — and world-transforming — innovation was the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Well, it was copied from a Xerox experimental lab, but it was Apple, not Xerox, that knew what to do with it. It gave us multiple windows, the mouse and the computer paradigm of point-and-click.

It also gave the machine a face with which we could interact. The idea of the machine face has, ever since, been an Apple obsession. Most vividly, it was demonstrated in the previous generation of the company’s G4 desktops, with their hemispherical white “shoulders”, from which sprang a chrome “neck” supporting a screen that could only, as a result, be read as a face. But it is also present in the current generation of desktops, in which the screen face has a single support that demands to be called a “foot”. The same points can be made about the cuddly, mobile and highly organic designs of the software.

The design emphasis of the iPods and the laptops is different but related. The iPod aspires to the condition of an implant, almost like a pacemaker, in that it keeps on growing smaller. And the peripherals sold by Apple offer you the chance to strap it to your body. The laptops may not be able to shrink to fit quite as much, but Ive has refined the designs to the point where they seem more like art objects that are part of the human world, rather than machines in conflict with it.

All of which is to say that the true subject of Apple’s art is the cyborg, the integration of human and machine. It is no accident that it was Ridley Scott, the director of the great cyberpunk thriller Blade Runner (1982) — a film about the ultimate confusions at the machine-human interface — who directed that 1984 television advert. Both contrasted the idea of machine hell with that of machine paradise.

Of course, Apple may be about to go horribly wrong, as it has done in the past. Certainly, its new shops, with their “genius bars” and auditoria to induct converts, suggest that the theme of the prayer meeting is being taken to dangerous extremes. The imminent underground store in New York is surmounted by a 32ft glass cube bearing only the Apple logo, a hubristically ecclesiastical effect.

Furthermore, it is far from clear that the iPod boom can be converted into a potentially more lucrative computer boom for the company. Its share of the computer market remains dangerously low at about 3%.

But what the hell? I couldn’t have written this article about Dell, BMW, BP, Microsoft, Sony or IBM. No company I can think of is quite as consistently interesting as Apple, and I can certainly think of none that might qualify as a corporate work of art. So, on the sole basis that interesting me is a good thing, happy birthday, Apple, and many more of them.