Nick, its really obvious here, you have a major case of Envy. What got you to this point of hating a company so much? You hate opposing football clubs this much?

Time to get a life, and start writing about things that are really important.

BTW, it might have been nice in one of your articles to point out, the reason Apple slipped down to 3rd place, is because of all the sub $400 US netbooks coming out. Thats what pushed acer up. (and I happen to think those MSI and acer netbooks are fun as hell)

And the companion of the [...] Steve Jobs. [...] loved her The Cook than all the fanboys, and used to kiss The Cook often on [...]. The rest of the fanboys [...]. They said to him "Why do you love The Cook more than all of us?" The Savoury answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like The Cook? When a hungry man and one who eats are both together in appetites, they are no different from one another. When the repast comes, they who eat will eat, separating the curds from the whey, the wheats from the chaff, the Apples from the eye, the toys from the pram, and The Hungry Mile will remain the Hungry Mile... "

... Do you really think any senior exec in Apple would last very long if they sought any credit for anything that could possibly be attributable to Teh Steev?

It's quite possible that Mr. Cook is actually taking care of business while the world follows Steve, and is happy (and well-compensated) to eschew the spotlight.

Actually, if Tim does _too_ well, and Steve comes back, it may be curtains for Tim..

Jobs will run the company from invisibly his hospital bed while Cook is the public puppet seen to be running things. In actuality, Cook won't be running anything. That is my opinion. Assuming of course that this isn't a bait and switch and Jobs is worse off than we've been lead to believe. Apple could be seriously in trouble and their competitors should be chomping at the bits to take advantage of it. As noted, the recession makes buying over priced kit a rather unlikely possibility for most.

They make the google adroid phone, plus the HTC Touch HD. The Touch HD is like the iphone but with a better screen, gps etc. www.htc.com

Too many times there are clowns in charge of businesses who do not see the value in great products.

Re Tim Cook, I'm sure he's a capable man, probably Jobs's right hand man. I expect the designers will not be getting sacked, and that there will be powerpoint presentations in Jobs's private room at the hospital. I think things will continue as normal unless some fools try to create a power struggle.

"Apple had a great deal of success, mostly by getting out if its traditional business of making nice looking hardware that caught fire and turning to gizmos and toys."

Apple's market share has been *rising* for most of the last few years. Its traditional business of selling well-designed laptops that aren't complete shit hasn't done too badly. (Granted, people do tend to scale back their aspirations during a recession, but the fact that the much-hyped "netbooks" only accounted for a mere 5%-ish of sales this past year suggests those aren't the saviour of the IT industry either.)

As for those gadgets and toys...

How many hundreds of models of phones have Nokia, Motorola, HTC and SonyEricsson designed over the years? How much collective experience do they have?

Yet a company like Apple could come out of the blue and wipe the floor with them after producing just *TWO* phones? WTF?

Whatever your beef against Apple might be, perhaps you should be venting more of your spleen against their piss-poor rivals who haven't managed to produce a single credible rival to the iPhone or iPod.

The only exception seems to be Palm -- a company which, like Apple, seemed to have been written-off by so many in the media.

No, Apple aren't perfect. No company is. But I don't see what's so damned *wrong* about insisting that "Good Enough" is nothing of the sort. Stop blaming Apple for doing something right and start demanding why their rivals *keep getting it so damned wrong*.