When the Apple Heads start preaching to me about how Microsoft stole the GUI for Windows from Apple, I always remind them that Apple stole it from Xerox PARC. They usually get quiet after that.

But even so, you have to give Jobs and Woz credit for taking the Xerox prototype, productionizing it, and distributing it to the masses.

The Apple IIe, the original one-box Mac, and the iPhone all leveraged emerging concepts and put each of them into an extremely well thought out product that the average person could afford.

I too remember when each of them came out and there was nothing else even close to their abilities on the market when they arrived. Apple had vision, while other companies in the same field struggled to get more rudimentary products out the door.

Basically as consumers, we have two paths to follow: we can take the closed-system proprietary approach that Apple offers (pro: reliability con: high cost, sw selection) or the open system approach that the PC platform provides (pro: lost cost, great sw selection, con: reliability). You can see this repeated in the smart phone arena, with the proprietary iPhone and the open system Android. Neither choice is wrong, it’s simply a matter of what is more important to you.