We are talking about Jobs. Even without him, I presume that Jonathan Ives can still do industrial design at a high level.

And as far as losing it's "lead", even after Apple played catch up with the iPod (it wasn't the prime mover in portable music devices at launch time), they still haven't lost it.

They take software principles and apply it to hardware. From one product release to the next, there's incremental improvements, hardly anything dramatic.

The mark of a good company is whether it can develop talent so there's a decent succession plan in place in case of accidents, etc. (colloquially we call it a "truck factor" - what happens if person X gets hit by a truck...).

Some companies are better at it than others. That tends to factor into the overall stock price as well. Wall St. doesn't like major upheavals.

Really? Not that I am invested in AAPL, but it's got a PE of ~23. Going by Benjamin Graham's rule of thumb it needs to grow at 7.5%. What with the healthy product stream (iPads, new customer base with CMDA iPhone), that doesn't seem terribly overpriced.

perhaps you havent seen the shift microsoft has made since WinMo6.

No, I think he means the Kin. Another aborted attempt at a user interface...