This might have irritated some people. But Ive synchs with Jobs, readily playing Sullivan to his Gilbert. Ive, the son of a silversmith, likes to talk about industrial design "as product narrative. My view is that surfaces and materials and finishes and product architecture are about telling a bigger story." The story the new iMac wanted to tell, he says, was about a flat display so light, fluid and free that it could almost fly away.

He had a good working sketch of the new design within a day. But engineering the machine—squeezing all the gear into the little box that Jobs wanted—took nearly two years.

There are some things in the world of Jobs that you can rely on. On warm days, he will always appear at work shoeless and in hiking shorts. The rest of the time, he will always wear Levi's jeans, no belt and one of the hundreds of black, mock-turtleneck shirts a clothing-designer chum made for him many years ago. (Not having to worry about what to wear to work every day allows him to concentrate more on work, he says.) And he will always take any opportunity he can to lay out the wider context, the framework—and how Apple fits in. Pull up a chair, because Jobs is about to paint you the big picture.

The way Jobs sees it, the world is entering the third phase of personal computing. (For those of you who haven't been following along, the first era was all about utility—folks using their thinking machines to do word processing, run spreadsheets, create desktop graphics and the like. The second phase was about wiring all those machines together on the Internet.) Now that we're all interconnected and productive, we're ready for the next great era: people using computers to orchestrate all the new digital gear that has steadily crept into their lives.

At this point, Jobs likes to draw a diagram, which begins with an outer ring; he draws gadgets on that ring. "We are surrounded by camcorders, digital cameras, MP3 players, Palms, cell phones, DVD players," he says. Then he draws a computer in the center of the ring. "Some of these things are plenty useful without a personal computer. But a personal computer definitely enhances their value. And several are completely unusable without a PC—a PC meaning a Mac, in our case."

Now he fixes you with his famous pay-attention-here stare and furrows his Salman Rushdie eyebrows: "We believe the next great era is for the personal computer to be the digital hub of all these devices."

Here's how it works. Take digital cameras, which sold even better than retailers expected in 2001, despite the recession. "The problem is," says Jobs, "the minute you plug them into your computer, you fall off a cliff. It's just a complete mess on the computer. We decided that this was our calling—a place where we can really make a difference."

If the new iMac functions as well as it's supposed to, it will simplify your digital life like no other machine can. You can buy a PC with a flat-panel display and a built-in DVD burner for around $1,800, the same as the equivalent iMac. But it won't work as well. In part, that's because Apple gives away a number of core programs (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD and, starting this week, iPhoto) that allow you to control your creative life. They do what other PC software does. But they do it better.

Apple's secret, which doubtless comes from Jobs' early flirtation with Zen Buddhism, is knowing what to leave out, understanding that in the complex world of computers, less is way more.

For instance, iPhoto, a program for handling those digital pictures, is superior to anything else out there for the amateur. How? When you connect your camera to the iMac, archiving pictures happens automatically—the pictures are uploaded and organized by "roll" and archived together as thumbnail images laid out on one endlessly scrolling digital contact sheet. A slider on the side of the contact sheet lets you instantly enlarge and examine hundreds of pictures at a glance, the better to find the one you're hunting for. This works far better than the PC alternative, which would have you manually labeling each picture you archive ("Joe at the Beach") or accepting a meaningless default name, like A2393745. (Best feature of the new program: point-and-click together a 10-page photo album of your favorite pics, pay $30 and an online publisher will print and mail you your own hardcover book.)