Stevie's Little Wonder

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Add to that the nightmare of manufacturing a delicate little Fabergé egg like the Nano in the quantities that rapacious appetites will demand this fall, and you get a sense of the degree of difficulty. "It's been an enormous bet," says Jobs, never one to minimize the grandeur of his accomplishments. "This is probably one of the most aggressive volume ramps in the history of consumer electronics."

The result is something that looks less like a music player than like the remote control for a music player. The Nano is thinner than a pencil and lighter than two bucks in quarters. It's one-fifth the size of the original iPod that Apple introduced four years ago. It has 4 GB of memory, enough to hold 1,000 songs, and it displays album art and photographs. And as small as it is, the Nano's got some audio oomph: this mouse can roar.

For a device ostensibly created to be listened to, it is suspiciously good-looking. It's so teensy and glossy and perfect, you want to put it in your mouth like a hard candy. For that, blame Jonathan Ive, 38, the affable Brit who heads Apple's industrial-design department. Ive is about as obsessive-compulsive as you can be without being hospitalized, and his wild enthusiasm for detail is what gives iPods the aura of sleek, otherworldly perfection that has helped make them the quintessential 21st century accessory.

Ive fondles a tiny Nano affectionately, pointing out all the things that nobody will ever notice but that he sacrificed months of his life for--things like the laser etching of the logo on the back or the surface's being slightly rougher on the click wheel than on the rest of the front. "I know you're not going to consciously find these details particularly appealing," he concedes, "but I think it's the fact that we've worried about all of them that makes the product so precious." He begs me to admire the tightness of the reveals--that's industrial-design-speak for the gap where two parts meet--and the finish on the tiny aluminum bottom plate where you plug in the headphones. When I ask him what the finish is--hey, just being polite--he politely declines to tell me. If there's one thing Apple is even more obsessive about than design, it's trade secrets.

"There used to be a saying about Apple," Jobs says, relaxing after the show. "A ship that leaks from the top." That's no longer the case--only a small group at Apple even knew about the Nano before it launched--but if it were, Jobs would surely have some interesting trade secrets to be leaked. The iPod has returned Apple to a role it hasn't played in at least 20 years: the favorite. Only 4.5% of U.S. computer users work on PCs running Apple's operating system software, and the number is even lower worldwide, but Apple has a commanding 74% of the U.S. digital-music-player market--and that's a market likely to grow. A new survey of junior high, high school and college students rates the iPod No. 1 among back-to-school gadgets.