A young upstart Steve Jobs reached into a squat duffel bag and lifted out the future of computing. He looked like a magician lifting a rabbit out of a hat.

The rabbit was the Macintosh. "Insanely great," he called it. That was 1984. Now 14 tumultuous years later, Steve Jobs pulls out another rabbit. Profits. Fat, huge, unbelievable, cash-in-the-pocket profits.

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How'd he do that? Control, control, control. Control spending. Control the product line. Control the promotion and distribution.

And the fruits of that labor leaped out of his electronic top hat: Sales, profits, market share.

Spending

Out of hand at Apple. If you had a favorite technology that you wanted to pursue, Apple usually gave you the green light. Do it. Make it happen. Make us proud.

Making a technology that customers liked almost seemed like an afterthought. Or sometimes it was simply bungled, like the Newton introduction. The original not-ready-for-prime-time-handwriting-recognition product. It never had a chance. Jobs cut it out. Cut out other things like printers, scanners, the set top internet box called Pippin. A quick look at the awful results Web TV is getting even after Microsoft told Jobs Pippin was not the product nor the time. All told these secondary products brought in $500-million in sales to Apple. It was a ton of money but it cost Apple a ton and a half to make and sell those products.

Production

Apple was making too much stuff that it could not sell and not enough of the product that was selling well. Apple had huge numbers of computers coming back, unsold, from retailers. And had huge backorders on its successful pieces.

Those huge returns angered retailers and those huge backorders angered the customers. So Jobs revamped how it sold and built computers. Job's first try was the build to order form on the Apple web site. You come to the site and we'll build to your order. That taught Apple two important things: how to take orders and crank out the product quickly, and where the customers' tastes in computers were going.

By not pre-building models with certain features, Apple eliminated the problem of guessing wrong about who would buy what. At the Cupertino love fest, Jobs proudly proclaimed that inventory (computers built but yet unsold) dropped from two month's worth to less than a week.

Promotion and distribution

"You gotta computer need, we gotta computer for you!" FIFTEEN models would stare back at you in the store. Eye glazing time. Jobs narrowed the focus to one model and at time. Keep the customer's eyes on one product and pound it in.

$100-million dollars in TV radio and print ads will blanket the American senses promoting one product. One. The iMac.

By the same token Apple cut out all its marginal stores, places that sold lots of stuff and had a few Macs in the back, too. It extracted a promise of dedicated space in each store of the CompUSA chain. It dumped all but the most ardent (and capable) Mac only chains.

Jobs distributed the product only through stores that WANTED to sell it, not just kept it as an also ran. It worked.

CompUSA reported iMac sales as the hottest computer ever of any kind in any of its stores. Regional Mac-only chains like ComputerWare in the west reported jumps in sales triggered by the intense iMac promotion.

Meanwhile Apple this weekend releases the latest of its great OS. MacOS 8.5 makes the fastest desktop in the world even faster. It's got a way cool search servant named Sherlock that combines all the usual search engines and reports back to you in plain English (or any of seven other languages if you like).

It also features stuff like proportional scroll bars and better crash protection.

Nice, but it's speed we want. The quickest of the quick is now quicker.

Now what?

We were expecting a lot more at the press conference/celebration. We were expecting a new Mac. Long rumored but never seen in the daylight, Apple is believed to be working on a new consumer laptop.

One of the names is the eMac. Inexpensive, color and lightweight. Did I say inexpensive? A color version of the eMate that green lily-pad like device that school kids loved but Steve Jobs hated. (It wasn't in color the way a Mac should be. It didn't use the real MacOS like the genuine Macs.)

Just as the iMac was a radical change for Apple, so the eMac would be a radically new idea in consumer laptops. So where is it? Mum's the word.

Maybe we'll have to wait until the next big profits announcement. They're getting to be a regular thing.

Surf on....