Apple to Unveil 2 More Powerful Macintosh PCs : Sculley Reformation Posts New Standard Bearers in Battle for Office Market

Today brings a moment of truth for Jean-Louis Gassee, a man who often finds himself meditating in front of a refrigerator, in awe of the “smooth,” unobtrusive way it fits into modern life.

Apple Computer is unveiling in Los Angeles today the latest fruits of its efforts to achieve a similar mechanical elegance with its products: two new models of the Macintosh personal computer. The machines, the Macintosh SE and Macintosh II, were developed under the guiding hand of French-born Gassee, a metaphysical thinker who two years ago stepped into the maelstrom of the company’s restructuring and took over the Mac team from the company’s better-known metaphysical thinker, co-founder and former chairman Steven P. Jobs.

In introducing these machines, especially the Mac II, Apple is showing that once and for all it has cut its philosophical ties to Jobs, who left the company in an acrimonious power struggle in September, 1985.

The new machines still bear the marks of Jobs’ visionary ideas of what personal computers should be, but much more reflect the thinking of Gassee and current Apple Chairman and Chief Executive John A. Sculley. The Mac II is the “open Mac” that Jobs so bitterly fought and that Sculley and Gassee were determined to have.

Symbolic of the company’s two-year effort to reshape itself without sacrificing its own standards of technology--or, in fact, too much of its personality--the new Macs are positioned to be Apple’s standard bearers in its continuing foray into the IBM-dominated office computing environment and other emerging market niches. They will be important too, to the company’s revenue; Macintosh products accounted for more than half the company’s sales last year of $1.87 billion, having eclipsed the older Apple II line last year.

The machines, designed with more power and more compatibility with other office computing equipment than previous Apple products, answer many of the complaints of corporate computer buyers. Especially important are the “slots” that open the machines to add-on devices that let the Macs run like other computers. Industry experts who already have seen the machines praise them, but are just as impressed with Apple’s timing.

International Business Machines, Apple’s most formidable competitor in the personal computer industry, is expected to introduce new personal computer models this year. Observers now say it may be April before the first of the new IBM PCs are introduced, and perhaps as late as 1988 before IBM can incorporate a new operating system that takes advantage of the advanced Intel 80386 microprocessor.

The more time IBM takes in getting to the market with its new models, especially those that address the growing demand for enhanced graphics capability, the better for Apple and its new Macs, say analysts.

More Powerful Machines

The Macintosh SE is a more powerful version of the Macintosh Plus model, but it closely resembles other Macs in appearance, retaining the small, nine-inch screen and tall, slender profile.

The Macintosh II is a truly new Mac, in looks, internal design and with six of the clamored-for “slots” that allow addition of specialized circuit boards. The screen is larger and the monitor is now separate from the box that holds the main electronic components and disk drives. The Mac II--finally--has an optional color monitor. Powered by the new Motorola 68020 microprocessor, it operates four times as fast as the Macintosh Plus.

Additional products from Apple and other companies, due mid-summer, will give the Macs more compatibility with other major computer lines. Both will be able to accept data, or files, generated on IBM and IBM-compatible computers--a feature that is important to the office environment. With an add-on card, expected to be announced today by AST Research of Irvine, the Mac II will be able to run software programs, such as Lotus 1-2-3, made for IBM and like machines.

The company expects the Mac SE, which already is in mass production and will be available in stores today, to have the biggest effect on the company’s finances this fiscal year, which ends in September, and to become the staple of the Mac line.

Shipments of the higher-priced Mac II will begin in May, although full-scale production won’t be achieved until late summer. “It will take a number of months before we can think of meeting the demand for the Mac II,” Sculley said in an interview Friday.

‘Changing the World’

But the Mac II “opens up so many possible markets for us, as well as expanding markets where we’re already established, such as desktop publishing,” he said. Among the new markets Apple is eyeing are higher education, computer-aided engineering, and design and government, where the Mac has been hampered by requirements for IBM compatibility.

The new Macs are the cap on the Sculley-led reformation of the company, which since 1985 has seen its profits and stock price rebound, its product lines rejuvenated and its internal bickering calmed. Although many inside the company and out had feared that Jobs’ departure would signal Apple’s transformation from a quirky, charismatic company into a staid one with a strictly business mentality, that has not been the case.

“You don’t change the roots of a company,” said Sculley. “The roots of Apple were built on a dream--a dream to change the world.”

Apple is still and “will always be a bit of a maverick company,” he said. “Everything at Apple is very right-brained. Most businesses have a Cartesian or Teutonic mind-set.”

But Sculley admits that Apple has toned down its personality. “Personality is like arsenic,” he said. “A little bit helps but a lot will hurt.”

Gassee, whose title is vice president of product development, fills in some of the personality void created by the departure of Jobs and fellow Apple co-founder Stephen (the “Woz”) Wozniak.

Legendary License Plates

Sculley brought Gassee, who had been manager of the company’s successful Apple France division, to Cupertino to direct marketing of the Macintosh line--and eventually, to take over the Mac division from the mercurial Jobs.

By the summer of 1985, Jobs had been stripped of operating duties at the company, and there was no doubt about whose philosophy had won out; Gassee was tooling around in a Mercedes bearing a license plate, now nearly legendary in Silicon Valley, that read “OPEN MAC.”

Gassee, who once called Jobs “that visionary monster, aesthetic, solitary, odious and fascinating,” said in an interview last week that he had been “frightened” by the comparisons between him and Jobs that accompanied his arrival in the United States.

“Nobody could be Steve Jobs,” he said. “He is the most powerful charismatic person I’ve ever met.”

Not that Gassee, who turns 43 this week, lacks charisma. An engaging man who insists that work should be “fun,” his speech is sprinkled with similes that are at once irreverent, sexual and psychological. As in: “Looking to Wall Street to measure a company is like trying to measure Marilyn Monroe by chest size. It doesn’t give you the gestalt.”

Yet the passion for “machine elegance” that drives Gassee to stare in wonder at refrigerators, thermostats and other examples of transparent technology is not unlike Jobs’ devotion to the notion that computers could and should be easy for people to use.

“Elegance has many masters,” said Gassee, who touches on such issues in his book, “The Third Apple; Personal Computers and The Cultural Revolution,” which recently was translated into English and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Vindication of Jobs

“Sometimes elegance is discreet; sometimes the best elegance is unseen. Some of us take pride in the small details that the customer can enjoy without seeing them.” To stay compatible with the old Macintosh line, yet allow more compatibility with other computer brands and “hide” the technology from the users, “that’s technical elegance,” he said. “Buddha is in the details.”

Sculley, who also likes to use the word “elegance” when describing the company’s products, joins Gassee in paying homage to Jobs’ influence. “Any revolution (requires) bold and sometimes painful decisions. But many things that Apple is doing now vindicate Steve’s boldness,” Sculley said. “Ideas that were considered arrogant and outrageous two years ago--like graphics and user interface--are now considered mainstream in the industry.”

Although Sculley insists that the company is no longer arrogant, some of the old hauteur is evident in his appraisal of the Apple image. “I think the world would lose if Apple weren’t Apple . . . people would be disappointed, don’t you think?”

APPLE COMPUTER’S NEW MACHINES MACINTOSH SE Microprocessor: The Motorola 68000, a 32-bit chip, with 7.8-megahertz clock frequency. Memory: 1 megabyte of random-access memory (expandable to 4 megabytes), 256 kilobytes of read-only memory, and 256 kilobytes of parameter memory. Disk storage: Two 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drives, with 800-kilobyte capacity per double-sided disk; optional 20-megabyte hard disk drive. Screen: Nine-inch monochrome only; 512-by-342 pixels, bit-mapped display. Price: $2,899 (list) for the base model with two floppy disk drives; $3,699 includes a 20-megabyte hard disk drive. MACINTOSH II Microprocessor: The Motorola 68020, a 32-bit chip, with 15.6-mega hertz clock frequency. Memory: 1 megabyte of random-access memory (expandable internal ly to 8 megabytes and externally to 2 gigabytes); 256 kilobytes of read-only memory. Disk options: One or two 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drives; internal and/or external 20-, 40- and 80-megabyte hard disks. Screen: 12-inch monochrome or 13-inch RGB color; both 640-by-480 pixels. Optional video card allows up to 256 colors. Price: Ranges from $4,798 for a base system with a 12-inch monochrome screen, one floppy disk drive and 1 megabyte of RAM, to $6,998 for a system that includes 13-inch color screen and adds a 40-megabyte hard disk.