DETROIT - It's a long way from Henry Ford's gritty factory complex on the banks of the Rouge to the light-filled atrium of Apple Inc.'s corporate headquarters in sunny Silicon Valley.
But events this past week have leaders of Detroit's Big Three automakers thinking less about differences and more about similarities between themselves and the once-troubled company that brought the world iPods, Macintosh computers and - starting in June - iPhones.
Apple's problems, circa 1997, are familiar: red ink, falling market share, tumbling stock price and persistent doubts about its future. Analysts questioned whether it could find someone to permanently replace ousted CEO Gil Amelio, who had been hired to turn the company around.
The key to the turnaround - engineered by returning co-founder Steve Jobs - was in ideas as old as capitalism itself. Make something new, something people want to buy.
Detroit is watching.
This past week, Jobs introduced the iPhone, a cross between the cellular telephone, a computer and the company's wildly successful personal music players. In Detroit, automakers unveiled multiple new models of cars, each carrying the hope that people will buy enough of them to change red ink to black.
For the Big Three, the problem - for the past few years, anyway - has been product. They made boatloads of cash on trucks and sport utility vehicles when gas was cheap and the economy was booming, but they were late in changing when petroleum costs spiked and people wanted something more efficient.
Now they're all losing billions and scrambling to catch up with customers who are increasingly being drawn to cars made by foreign-based automakers, particularly Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co.
Auto executives know they can learn a lot from how Jobs used a new product and clever marketing to raise his company from the grave.
''We're really trying to be more like companies like Apple, where we can innovate and move faster,'' said Mark LaNeve, vice president of sales, service and marketing for General Motors Corp.
Before October 2001, when the first iPod was launched, digital music players were clunky and had limited storage capacity. Apple saw an opportunity and jumped on it, introducing a sleek player with a hard drive large enough for thousands of songs, a click wheel for quick navigation and, within months, an online store that offered a legal means for filling up the iPod.
There are differences, of course, between a 3,600-pound car and an egg-shaped iMac or a featherweight iPod Shuffle, chief among them the time it takes to design and build them.
The new iPhone took 2 1/2 years to bring to market - and even that's a long time in the consumer electronics niche, where many products live in six- or 12-month development cycles. The average car takes four or five years.
Also, Apple contracts out virtually all its manufacturing, whereas the Big Three have billions invested in plants and machinery and must bear the health care, pension and salary costs of a huge - though quickly shrinking - and expensive unionized labor force.
Still, Apple's core focus on consumer appeal can serve as a model.
Eric Ridenour, chief operating officer of DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group, sees Chrysler's 300 sedan and the 1980s invention of the minivan as products with similar impact to the iPod.
The 300's striking silhouette brought the company big profits when it came out in 2004, quickly becoming the large-car sales leader. Likewise, the minivan created a whole new segment of the market.
GM expects the Chevrolet Volt to be a breakthrough product. The electric car plugs into a home outlet and has a small gas engine that together give the small car a range of more than 600 miles on a tank of gas.
It's just a prototype, but LaNeve said it's within reach in the short term and that products such as the Volt could help reduce or eliminate America's dependence on fossil fuels.
But gone are the days when one product can carry a company. Efraim Levy, an auto industry analyst for Standard & Poor's, said Chrysler's 300 and Charger were hit products that carried the company, but now that their popularity is waning, Chrysler is again struggling.
Apple showed this week it has learned that lesson, bringing out products that cement its metamorphosis from a computer company into a consumer electronics powerhouse. On Tuesday, it dropped the word Computer from its name to reflect the shift. Investors cheered, sending shares of Apple Inc. to an all-time high.
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