Okay, so you hate Apple, and that's fine. (I hate Dell.)

But "like most of Apple's products, it will be done better, cheaper and be generally more widely used when it is done by somebody else"? It makes me wonder if you've heard of the iPod.

Other companies have been trying to do better, cheaper and more popular versions of the iPod more or less since it was introduced. The most recent market share figures show Apple with 71 percent of the music player market, Sandisk with 11 and that iPod-killer known as the Zune with 4.

And phone manufacturers have spent the last 18 months trying to catch up with the iPhone, with essentially no luck. Considering the extremely short product cycles in the wireless business, that should tell you something, particularly because Apple actually announced the product about six months before it was released. (It's actually kind of amusing to watch ads for competing products - Verizon had one in the Christmas season in which various teenagers talked about their phones and ticked off one feature on each one that was like something on the iPhone, as if nobody would notice that none of the Verizon phones had the full feature set.) As has been the case for the iPod, the new iteration of the iPhone software and hardware addresses a lot of the issues that customers had raised about the original and adds other features as well.

Of course, the response to all of this is that the Mac was overtaken by the PC. Leave aside for a moment that there's never been a serious argument that Windows has been better than the Mac OS for any sustained period, and certainly not since OS X was introduced. (Now if you want to say Linux is better, you may have an argument, but the number of Linux boxes out there is much smaller than the number of Macs.) According to NPD, Apple has a 14% share in the PC market, and has been experiencing significant growth the last several years, while recently the PC market as a whole has been essentially flat. In other words, Apple is taking market share away from Windows PCs. In fact, Gartner says that Apple increased sales by 32% in the first quarter, much more than any of its competitors.