The iPhone is a very clear statement about what Steve Jobs thinks a consumer electronics device should be like. That was the conclusion in an interview posted at the New York Times on Thursday in which John Markoff described Apple's impact on consumer products. In the interview, Mr. Jobs said, "I don�t want people to think of this as a computer....I think of it as reinventing the phone."

The iPhone was compared to the original Macintosh from 1984, that is, a premium product with limited expandability. Mr. Markoff continued: "In a similar fashion, Mr. Jobs is gambling that people will pay a premium ($499 or $599) for the iPhone and appears to have sought to limit its expandability."

However, in the case of a mobile phone, the product usage is different. PC users need expandability, but mobile phone users need ease of use, security, and dependability. Mr. Markoff recounted Mr. Jobs' thinking: "We define everything that is on the phone,� he [Mr. Jobs] said. �You don�t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn�t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers."

Mr. Jobs also stated that "Apple had not decided whether to enable a voice-over-Internet service like Skype -- a potentially divisive issue for Cingular, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, because it could come at the expense of cellular voice revenue."

The article provided considerable insight into how Apple handled many of the difficult issues associated with their first mobile phone and how Apple's vision and technical approach defined the product introduced at Macworld.