Love em or hate em, you have to admire Apple. I just love my mac computers, and my wife loves her iPhone. My kids are addicted to their iPods (as am I).

I liked the comments that Steve Jobs made some years ago, about technology companies not simply being able to ask the customer what they want then going and producing it. The point of his comments was that you actually have to try to see ahead and innovate yourself, because if you produce what people want today, they probably won’t want it any more by the time you go through all the steps to get it on the shelf. As I see it, Apple today do what Sony was doing in the 1980s, inventing great things that created their own demand. Should apple have invented the iPod, or should it have been Sony/Panasonic/Etc.? Whatever you think, I sure wish I’d invented it. Look at Apple these days, huge, successful, and relatively expensive. They make mistakes of course, and sometimes technology itself lets them down. But their products are extremely well designed, and their macintosh computers, in my humble opinion, put the rest of the market to shame. For me, I’m not interested in having to learn about such things, I just want it all to work out of the box, which is where Apple Macs usually win. Now, before I get hit with all the “my linux setup can do all that at a third of the price” replies, I know. But it doesn’t do it straight from the box, and most of the time the grey box housing all the bits looks like a Volkswagen Beetle compared to a Jaguar E-type. I suppose, to sum it up, I drive a Chrysler Grand Voyager because it’s better built and works better than a Kia Carnival, and I used to drive a BMW before the kids came because it was better than my previous Ford. You pays your money and you takes your choice, and for an increasing number of people, that choice is an Apple product. I hope Forrest Gump held on to those Apple shares!