BeOS is a good point. And even if Be itself didn't change the world, there might have been flocks of Apple refugees who moved on to make something else wonderfu

BeOS is a good point. And even if Be itself didn't change the world, there might have been flocks of Apple refugees who moved on to make something else wonderful. So perhaps many of the same things would have happened if another player had developed to fill an Apple-like niche. As far as the technologies you mention go, they would have happened, but without Apple (or a sufficiently Apple-like player), they would have happened differently. Most of the other things you're talking about happened before Apple got to them. I had a Creative Labs Nomad -- it was cool to have, but the user experience kinda sucked. Sony and Toshiba in particular have a long history of making great thin and light computers that have generally fallen outside mainstream consumer price points, and many of these predate the original MacBook Air, nevermind the current generation ones. There were a variety of touchscreen phones that predate the iPhone, such as those based on WinMo. I had one or two. They tended to be unreliable and have errant apps that could wreck your whole system, so the UX kinda sucked. What Jobs's Apple was great at, especially with iOS, was distilling things down so that they were simple and friendly and had really good judgement about what to include, what to leave out, and how much control to expose to the user. The net result was that lots of technologies that were slowly happening anyway suddenly became massively popular because Apple managed to build the perfect product for a mass market. And as I say this, keep in mind that there's not a single Apple device that I use on a daily basis. I use Windows and Android happily, and wouldn't trade my current setup for any of the fine products that Apple makes. But simply by existing and releasing the products they did, Apple made Windows and Android better. Windows tablets had a lousy experience and sold poorly, and Apple completely redefined what it means to be a tablet with the iPad. Now Microsoft has delivered an awesome preview of Win 8 tablets, which would never have existed without the iPhone. Android and Windows Phone would be very different if the iPhone had never come to market and demanded that everyone rethink the idea of the smartphone. That's what I was trying to get at. Hopefully it makes more sense this go around.