"Openness facilitates a genuine conversation, and often collaboration, toward a shared outcome," says Steve Rubel, a senior vice president at the PR firm Edeleman Digital. "When people feel like they're on your side, it increases their trust in you. And trust drives sales."

In an April 2007 cover story, we at Wired dubbed this tactic "radical transparency." But Apple takes a different approach to its public relations. Call it radical opacity. Apple's relationship with the press is dismissive at best, adversarial at worst; Jobs himself speaks only to a handpicked batch of reporters, and only when he deems it necessary. (He declined to talk to Wired for this article.) Forget corporate blogs — Apple doesn't seem to like anyone blogging about the company. And Apple appears to revel in obfuscation. For years, Jobs dismissed the idea of adding video capability to the iPod. "We want it to make toast," he quipped sarcastically at a 2004 press conference. "We're toying with refrigeration, too." A year later, he unveiled the fifth-generation iPod, complete with video. Jobs similarly disavowed the suggestion that he might move the Mac to Intel chips or release a software developers' kit for the iPhone — only months before announcing his intentions to do just that.

Even Apple employees often have no idea what their own company is up to. Workers' electronic security badges are programmed to restrict access to various areas of the campus. (Signs warning NO TAILGATING are posted on doors to discourage the curious from sneaking into off-limit areas.) Software and hardware designers are housed in separate buildings and kept from seeing each other's work, so neither gets a complete sense of the project. "We have cells, like a terrorist organization," Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple's hardware and iPod divisions and now executive chair at Palm, told BusinessWeek in 2000.

At times, Apple's secrecy approaches paranoia. Talking to outsiders is forbidden; employees are warned against telling their families what they are working on. (Phil Schiller, Apple's marketing chief, once told Fortune magazine he couldn't share the release date of a new iPod with his own son.) Even Jobs is subject to his own strictures. He took home a prototype of Apple's boom box, the iPod Hi-Fi, but kept it concealed under a cloth.

But Apple's radical opacity hasn't hurt the company — rather, the approach has been critical to its success, allowing the company to attack new product categories and grab market share before competitors wake up. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in secret; that was a three-year head start on rivals. Likewise, while there are dozens of iPod knockoffs, they have hit the market just as Apple has rendered them obsolete. For example, Microsoft introduced the Zune 2, with its iPod-like touch-sensitive scroll wheel, in October 2007, a month after Apple announced it was moving toward a new interface for the iPod touch. Apple has been known to poke fun at its rivals' catch-up strategies. The company announced Tiger, the latest version of its operating system, with posters taunting, REDMOND, START YOUR PHOTOCOPIERS.)