Brian, you wrote this on the day that the Opera browser became available for the iPhone. In some ways it is very good, but in other ways it seems half finished. This is good, in the sense that Apple seems a bit more open to the process described above, and also because it means they are willing to accept competition to their own applications on the iPhone (in this case their Safari browser).

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985. There is no question it was that way round. He only came back when he was begged to, basically. I cannot imagine he will ever retire from the company now. However, he has had emergency life saving surgery twice, so that may not matter that much, unfortunately.

The problem with not committing to Apple is that means you are almost certainly committing to Microsoft.  And Bill Gates is in semi- (or, is it complete) retirement.  Which kind of explains Vista.

Can you tell that I bought a Mac last month?

Had to use a Mac keyboard in class on Monday. Hated it.

I personally think that Apple is still doing a great job. One just can’t be excellent in everything. Moreover comparing Apple to Microsoft, I guess it’s quite obvious that Jobs has gone far from Gates. And we, the customers, sometimes should give them easy time.

Apple did something very important when it introduced the iPhone. We had had mobile phones that were capable of handling data based applications for several years before that, but the mobile phone companies would not allow the user or the manufacturer of the phone to decide what the phone could do with these data services. The mobile phone operators wanted to decide what services were offered over their phones and demand a cut of every transaction. (It was common, by the way, for companies like Nokia to produce fancy new phones, and for companies like Vodafone to demand that many of their features be removed before they would be sold on the network). None of the services that the operators tried to sell took off, and only three or four years ago operators were saying things like “Users aren’t interested in data services”.

Steve Jobs went into a few meetings with mobile phone executives and screamed at them about how things were going to work in return for him deigning to allow his beautiful iPhone to use their network. A couple of networks told him where to go (Verizon in the US, principally - in recent times they have been begging him to please come back, but he has a long memory) but a couple did deals with him, and the iPhone was announced, which could run any application that Apple was willing to allow on it, and in which the network just sold the data and had no say in how it was used. Whatever Apple’s App store policy - in truth Apple allows the vast bulk of applications on the iPhone without much complaint - it was vastly better than before, and we now use the mobile internet everywhere. We really can thank Steve for most of this.

And if you don’t like the iPhone, there are plenty of phones using other operating systems that now work in the same way as the iPhone with respect to the mobile networks. I personally do like the iPhone. There are one or two applications I would like to see on it that I am not likely to due to Apple’s policies (MAME, VLC, bit-torrent clients) but its good things are such that I am going to use it anyway.

Patrick: Vista was great, apart from third-party hardware vendors not bothering to write drivers.

Brian: I’m not sure Jobs is a magic talisman, and Apple is doomed without him.

If they can find someone else with the same sort of obsession with “insanely great” User Experience (and knowing that the money comes from hardware, not software), they can prosper without him.

(Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were all not that person, or even close to it.)

Vista was great, apart from third-party hardware vendors not bothering to write drivers.

Other than requiring vastly more hardware resources than XP to run, and doing very little that XP couldn’t.

And also being unfinished when released, and requiring at least one service pack (probably two) to be stable when doing such things as a simple file copy from one volume to another.

Windows 7 is much better, and a good deal leaner. Vista itself is a good deal better than it was three years ago. However, it is silly to claim that it was originally anything other than a total train wreck.

The thing that awes me about Steve Jobs: he wears exactly the same clothes every day; he lived for ten years in an almost completely unfurnished house; and he is profoundly cool. I wish I could do that.

He lives in unfurnished house and “he is profoundly cool”?
I’d say, he’s a fanatical fool.

About Apple apps: on Saturday I was on a tour of an underground railroad tunnel (1st subway in the world, they said), and the guide mentioned rumors about giant 5’ rats that occupy the premises.
Then I’ve [inadvertently] eavesdropped on this conversation in the darkness in front of me:
Girl: Mike, what if there are those rats in here now? You don’t have a bat or a spike to fight them off!
Mike: I have an IPhone! There is an app for that!

The thing that awes me about Steve Jobs: he wears exactly the same clothes every day; ... I wish I could do that.

I thought you did.

Well, only somewhat.

I think your deletion in the middle of the quote is crucial thoughl.

Patrick: Vista was great, apart from third-party hardware vendors not bothering to write drivers.

I don’t completely agree with you that Vista is so good - Windows 7 has recently shown that the OS can be much more optimized and even more secure than the Mac X OS.That’s a real breakthrough for Bill Gates( Suppose that his retirement is over=)