The Windows and Android communities need to better understand why so many of us choose Apple, and the Apple community needs to better understand the large market of people who can’t or won’t.

Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

Your success is delicious. Others look at your success and think, “Well, duh, it’s so obvious what they did there - anyone can do that” and, frustratingly so, they’re right. Your success has given others a blueprint for what success looks like, and while, yes, the devil’s in the details, you have performed a lot of initial legwork for your competition in the process of becoming successful. I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

‘The problem is that this is exactly what the competition are doing — they are competing with the iPad rather than solving a problem that hasn’t been solved yet. They’re always one step behind because they’re simply trying to re-create the solution that Apple has created for their vision of a touch tablet device.’

Apple is run by a hippie and it's the most valuable company in the world. Those who think liberal values are anti-business need to look at that closely.

"I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline."

On crazy geniuses and products with and without imagination. "And the iPod itself is a shiny fruit fallen to earth from an enchanted tree in a mystical fairy land populated entirely by crazy geniuses."

"Steve Jobs gives a legendary keynote at Macworld SF every January, launching products and giving a state of the union view of things at Apple. What if you invested $10,000 the day before the keynote, then sold at the end of the keynote day?"

On the struggle between Apple and the music industry. "Is the government coming to take away your iPod? Of course not. But your iPod is already less functional than it should be."