TO THOSE ex-kremlinologists who now attempt to divine the future of Apple Computer, one of the wild cards in auguring the company’s fate has always been the far-ranging moods of the company's once and current CEO, Steve Jobs. Since his return to the company in 1998, rumors have leaked out of Apple's Cupertino, California campus, telling of temper tantrums that have killed off product lines, terrorized contrarian programmers, and more. Yet at this week's Macworld Expo in San Francisco, less than a month after the company announced its first loss in years and saw its stock plummet, Jobs exhibited a new, less Old Testament, emotion: humility. And, ironically, this newly discovered side may just have helped Jobs to stage a performance that could arrest Apple's recent nose dive.

To be sure, there was plenty of marketing hype in Jobs's Expo-opening keynote speech. There were the hoary old battery of Photoshop tests run simultaneously on a Mac and a Windows-based PC, certainly to be deconstructed by numerous, tech-head Web sites. There was new software that Jobs termed "revolutionary." There was the announcement that new Macs would break out of their eighteen-month doldrums, where they had languished at a mere five hundred megahertz even as Windows-based PCs were pushing triple that speed. (Though this was bound to happen eventually, the revelation it actually had sent a palpable ripple of relief through the partisan crowd of five thousand.) And there was the unveiling of the PowerBook G4, sheathed in a slim casing of titanium -- touted by Jobs as "Power + Sex."

But it wasn't the gross things that represented a possible salvation for Apple and Jobs. After all, the company was facing a stock price near book value, an upcoming quarterly loss of nearly $225 million, a backlogged inventory of between six to eleven weeks of mostly outdated product and -- perhaps most significant of all -- the specter of irrelevancy, even as the company was set to bet its own hide on the wholesale switchover to its next-generation (and controversial) operating system, OS X.

In an uncharacteristic detour into speculation and prognostication, Jobs wove a vision of what he called the next step in the evolution of the PC, the Age of Digital Lifestyles. Despite the cringe-inducing name, the vision seemed almost within reach as he pitched it: The personal computer would not be made irrelevant by the plethora of digital devices peppering our daily lives -- instead, the PC (or, more pointedly, the Mac) would be the hub -- storing, sorting, disseminating the data we capture with our camera, camcorders, PDAs, and cell phones. Towards this future, Jobs presented iTunes, a simple MP3 player and encoder, and iDVD, a similar application but for creating DVDs that can be shown in any consumer DVD player. Though we may all have had quite too much of the "iWhatever" monikers and the implications of even easier pirating may make the MPAA recoil, the bundling of the iDVD application and the top-dog Power Mac's new "SuperDrive," which can play and record all types of CDs and DVDs, could possibly be today's equivalent of the first desktop page-layout program matched to a laser printer. Like the first DTP bundle, the SuperDrive-equipped Mac is expensive -- coming in at around $3,500 -- but it's far cheaper than any other DVD authoring package, which can run over $10,000 with dedicated hardware. And like the DTP revolution, it may be a while before we see who the breakout users of this new tool are, or what the zine analog will be -- but it could be exciting.

Even more pronounced to longtime Macwatchers (and to those who may fear the addition of any extra digital devices to their own lifestyle) were comments made by Jobs early in his address. For those raised on tales of a Jobs hypersensitive to criticism, hearing him say the words "the last several months of 2000 were particularly challenging for Apple" was akin to hearing the President-elect begin his inaugural speech by admitting that more citizens voted against him than for him. And as Jobs walked through a revised demo of OS X, he pointed out that many of the "new" features were actually recreations of features eliminated in the move from OS 9. He even admitted that they were brought back because of user demand (over 75,000 pieces of beta-tester feedback). "Apple is listening," Jobs said.

And perhaps that makes all the difference in the world. Individual Mac users have long fought what they see as the good fight against Windows encroachment. The fact that Jobs might be feeling some of the same heat, that he may be in the same boat as the average user -- and can actually admit it -- can be cause for optimism.