The secret Apple sauce: ways to put a well built brand name to use

While the biggest names in tech were in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show in January showing off new gadgets and gizmos, Apple gambled it could extract attention in San Francisco for a sneak-peek debut of the iPhone, the combination music player/cellphone and Internet device.
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The attention may have been more supersized than usual, but the results were textbook Apple. The company's knack for the spotlight is in part born of necessity - it has just a 3% market share for computers - but it consistently generates buzz and anticipation for new products.

Steve Jobs, who told TIME editor Lev Grossman that he had earned "special treatment" from Cingular, forcing a change in the cellular service provider's voicemail system to allow for iPhone's random-access voice message interface. In the same interview, Apple's iPod division headman Tony Fadell added that Cingular "broke all [its] typical process rules" to implement Apple's requests.

A low-end Mac Pro will cost you $2,124 compared with $3,071 for a nearly identically configured Dell Precision Workstation 490. The Mac is about $947 cheaper - and the gap widens when you start piling on options such as more memory, faster processors and bigger hard drives.