[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I never hated the iPod per se. What I hated was watching the most flexible feature-rich players in the world lose market share, consumer desirability and, ultimately, existence. We shouldn't have had to wait a decade before HiFiMan provided a successor to iRiver's iHP140.

This wasn't really Apple's fault, though. I had an mp3 player pre-iPod, and Apple (in the person of Jobs) was absolutely correct when he said that they "sucked." They had bad interfaces and even worse computer integration. (And the company that should have been the strongest counterweight to Apple - Sony - had pretty much the worst product available).

I mean, you can hate Apple because they came out with a product that didn't suck, but it's a kind of pointless exercise, since 80% of people were much happier with iPods than they were with any existing product.

The HP 140 failed in the market because it offered a lot of features people didn't care about (line in recording, a built in mike) and lacked features people did care about - like a software program you could put on your computer. It's like Linux would be if a copy of Linux cost as much as a copy of Windows.

Here's what I'm hoping: for Apple to experience a number of post-Jobs failures that force it to take a role proportionate to everyone else's without killing its ability to sell its aesthetic and integrated approach to a large enough customer base to keep it solvent and its most talented people interested.

Apple doesn't need to fail for other companies to succeed. Apple is successful in the consumer electronics business (less so in the computer business, although they have their moments) because it knows what customers want and delivers it.

Meanwhile, companies all over the world could go back to trusting the talent in front of them rather than the recycled ideas of someone with a crushing market share.

This. Even though it's not clear whether it will actually success, W7 for phones is a good example of a company that *didn't* follow Apple, but started a UI design from the ground up with a completely different aesthetic. Get a few more companies doing this and things will be very interesting.

I prefer brand agnosticism to brand theism or atheism. At this moment, I'm more annoyed by Amazon's crippling control over non-music content than I am at Apple's lawsuits and the sealed garden of its Amway-like tech, but both are pretty bad.

I'm not sure where you get Amway - despite having a walled garden for Apps, Apple has the largest app store (although that is a pretty meaningless statistic now that we're talking hundreds of thousands of apps) and the best app selection. That's not like Amway at all.

May 2012 be the year of sustainable tablet diversity and the triumph (for once) of content over fashion -- of freedom and practicality over restrictions and broken functionality.

If you think that the iPad is an example of fashion over content, I would have to doubt your professed brand agnosticism.