I am in the Apple store on Fifth Avenue, New York, staring at the new iPod Nano. It's about the size of one of those credit card calculators that Texas Instruments once tried to convince the world it needed. But beyond calculating the square of the hypotenuse, this cool, silvery gadget can play music, videos and - if I believe the salespeople at the help desk, a.k.a. the Genius Bar - free my mind to become a genius myself.

Around me is a swirling madhouse. A bump-and-grind Brazilian soundtrack pumping up thousands of Apple fanatics, tourists and the merely curious cruising the store, checking their Yahoo accounts on MacBooks, caressing iPhones and buying everything. The checkout line zigzags back and forth like the customs snake at Kennedy Airport.

Which is a sight Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, would appreciate, because it's the world beyond this Apple store, beyond New York, beyond the US, which he seems to have his eyes on. If you believe what you read in the press about how "mind-blowing," "world-shaking" and "awe-inducing" Apple gadgets are, Jobs is a jeans-wearing prophet with an engineering Ph.D, who will free us from hard-copy media and bestow on us a sense of individual self, all of it delivered in a cool, sleek iThing...

But is an iPod really all that? Can Apple's touchy-feely products really change the world, as some Mac lovers declare just before putting down their latte, selecting Feist's new album on iTunes, and designing a new widget?

Jobs would have us believe that an Apple product will help us unleash our hidden "i" if only I would use an iPod, iMac, iPhone. The idea - or marketing concept - is that Apple's products - particularly the ubiquitous (and free) iTunes media-delivery program - empower me to choose what I listen to, watch or read, and when I do it. I am no longer beholden to the physical world of a CD store and the choices of its purchasing manager. I can download some obscure band from Outer Mongolia that only seven people have heard of, transfer the song to an iPod, and I'm set.

***

"Genius" is a word that is flung around as easily as a frisbee. It's used to describe scientists who complete an experiment, footballers who make a good pass, politicians who enact a new law. There could never really be as many geniuses as our liberal use of the word suggests. But we are a hyperbolic generation.

A real genius has a vision that challenges the world and has the ambition to realize the vision, whereupon the genius changes the world. Steve Jobs has sold more than 100 million iPods since they were introduced in 2002. I say that Steve Jobs has done this, rather than Apple, because he is the genius behind it. It was his vision that began Apple and - after a short exile from the company in the early 1990s - his ambition that realized digital technology's potential.

What he understood very early on was that few people are geeks like him. Most of us can't decipher computer code or write HTML or fix a bug in the operating system. We just want a computer and user-friendly digital toys that make our lives easier...

So, after rejoining the company in 1997, Jobs transformed the idea of what a computer company's purpose is. It is not to build a better computer-though he did that, too -it is to build a better you. Or, more correctly, to allow you to build a better i. Genius.
***

Apple has just three percent of the world's computer market - up from two percent in 2004. It's hard to believe this figure given the aura surrounding Apple and the bug-addled disaster that is Microsoft's latest operating system, Vista - but it's the truth. Despite Apple Macintoshes being more user-friendly and less vulnerable to viruses than a PC, relatively few people own Apple computers. Their market-share is almost entirely in the United States, and even there they have major distribution problems.

Yet Apple will tell you that's how they want it - because if everyone had a Mac, then they would be no different from Microsoft. And the last thing Steve Jobs wants is to become the next Microsoft, a company found guilty of monopolistic practices in Europe and the US, for forcing users to use Microsoft-approved programs. Where Apple wants to help you liberate your i, Microsoft wants to control your you.



***

I'm writing this on a Mac laptop, an iBook G4 that is four years' old. Compared to the new computers on display at the Apple store, mine looks like a world-weary dinosaur, tattooed with scratches and stickers and carrying a slight knock (my processor is really slo-o-o-w). I've been thinking about getting a new one, maybe upgrading to the PowerBook, but I really don't need all the Power in that Book.