Fer chrissakes..

..give the dude a break. No other company on the planet would garner this kind of ridiculous punditry. Let me spell it out for those who can't get to grips with reality: Apple != Steve Jobs despite appearances. Steve has infused Apple with his unique vision as he did at Pixar. It's still the talent at Apple - the engineers, designers, coders, etc - who make the magic happen, not Steve. They got the message long ago and continue to do so today. Steve did make Apple what it is today, but it will still be at the vanguard of computer design and engineering (where they've been for the last 20-odd years) long after he's dead and departed.

Steve sold Pixar to Disney some time ago and yet they still beat the living crap out of every other CGI animation company on the planet, including Dreamworks. Folks are too hung up on the mythos and not focussed enough on what Apple actually do as a company. They are spanking everyone else, including Microsoft - so tell me why there is no other company who can take on Apple?. If there were, we'd see someone leapfrogging Apple, whereas we all know and can see that, as Byte Magazine put it back in 1994 (!), "Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.". That adage remains as true today as it was seventeen years ago.

Like them or loathe them, no one can deny the extraordinary comeback Apple have made in the last thirteen years when they were, as Steve himself acknowledged at D8, 90 days from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Now, they are the biggest technology company on the face of the planet - ignore that at your peril!

=:~)