In the 20 years I have been listening to Steve Jobs, he has assumed many roles, all of them dramatic. By this I mean that Steve's approach to business -- and life -- is theatrical. His role models have varied from Peter Fonda to the Dalai Lama to Ross Perot, and like all these men, he enjoys and easily assumes the spotlight. But this week in his keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, while I saw the same dark shirt and small glasses of the early 1990s Steve Jobs, there was something different about both his look and his manner. In the past, I thought of Steve as a Jack Nicholson wannabe, but this was a different guy, at least on the outside. And then it struck me, and I knew in an instant who he looked like. Go find a picture and look closely. That's not Steve Jobs, it's Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie, the Indian novelist still under a death threat imposed by the now deceased Ayatollah Khomeini, has been in hiding for years, appearing only occasionally to make smart-assed and sardonic comments. Sounds like Steve Jobs to me. How do we know they aren't the same person? Has anyone ever seen these two together? What an irony if Rushdie, when he is supposed to be in hiding from those Shiite assassins, is actually making cartoons for Disney and running Apple on the side.

I know it's not true, but so much of Steve Jobs' life has been spent on the edge of unreality that he could be a Rushdie. From the minimum wage worker playing a costumed character from Alice in Wonderland at a shopping mall, Jobs parlayed his parents' good humor and a VW microbus into half a billion dollars in under five years. And less than five years after that he was out on his ass, selling more than six million shares of Apple stock at a ridiculously low price for reasons that made no business sense at all. And in between these high and low points were all the grand product intros, the screaming, the huge houses without furniture, the posing, seducing, and general acting-out that is Steve. He used the cover of Time magazine to try for a date with Diane Keaton. Joan Baez used Steve's ego to extract Mac after Mac after Mac from his Woodside garage, each of which she gave away to some friend. Those were the days of Armani suits and stiff collars, the days when Apple didn't even have a budget because the company couldn't imagine how it could ever spend all the money coming in. Those were the days.

But this week it was a different Steve Jobs making smaller claims, having smaller goals: Apple is profitable once more after nearly $2 billion in losses. Or was it a different Jobs at all?

For 12 years I have heard people saying, "Steve has changed." Being fired from the company he founded was supposed to have sobered him, made him grow up. That's what the folks said who left Apple in 1985 to found NeXT Inc. with Steve. They needed that reassurance that such a catastrophic experience had changed Steve, making him kinder, smarter, and less likely to eat his young. No such luck. First, Steve seduced and abandoned the education market, then the hardware market, then his own employees, and then his investors, causing so much damage that Canon, which lost $350 million in the NeXT debacle, has sworn it will never again build computers. And Ross Perot, where is he?

Steve Jobs has not changed, other than having grown a bit older, wider on the bottom and thinner on top like the rest of us. What's changed is the world. Announcing a $45 million profit for Apple in the quarter that traditionally supplies 40 percent of the company's annual profit doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment, but it's an accomplishment nevertheless. Steve has adapted to this time, a time when nobody can afford to alienate the whole world. Not even Steve Jobs.

In a time when families are fashionable again, Steve is a family man, doing the dishes some evenings when I walk past his Palo Alto home. When greed is no longer good, he has been generous with some of the loyalists from NeXT. When efficiency has become a way to measure business success, he talks about turning Pixar into a machine for making cartoons, rather than the haven for artists he liked to describe a decade ago. It's the time that's changed, not Steve.

And what of Apple? Does the $45 million profit mean anything? It meant +$3 per share to Wall Street, but that can go away as easily as it came. It means Apple still has a long way to go. Notice that every remaining Mac clone shown at MacWorld now comes bundled with PC emulation software. Every one.

Behind Jobs' remarks in San Francisco are a lot of unanswered questions. Why didn't he mention Rhapsody, the new MacOS rising from the ashes of NeXTstep? Where was the network computer announcement that we're all sure Larry Ellison is pushing Apple toward? It's not that those announcements aren't pending, because nosing around Apple tells me they are still on the way, but that Jobs, like any old racehorse, is saving himself for the stretch drive. Woody Allen said that 95 percent of success is just showing up, and this week that's what Steve Jobs and Apple did.

So don't read too much into it.

The more telling news this week concerns Intel. Last week the company dropped some Pentium II prices by a third. What gives? This week Compaq announced El Cheapo computers with AMD processors to match their earlier El Cheapo computers with Cyrix processors. And IBM, which MAKES Cyrix processors, announced it would sell El Cheapo AMD machines of its own. This is no mere coincidence, but a major attack on Intel from two of its biggest customers. This shot across Intel's bow is intended to show Andy Grove that he is not in such complete control, and that if we are really headed toward a $500 PC, then some of the cost savings required to make that price possible will have to come out of the microprocessor. Look for quarterly Intel price cuts to continue.