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In 10 years it will be Steve who? MP3 players will be in the same junk box with 8 tracks. iPAD & MacBook will be piled in the same corner with 286 computers.

Pixar may be the only lasting technology as it evolves into lifelike photoshop animation to totally eliminate actors and sets.

MP3 players were around before the iPod. The point is that Apple's device made the format and, more importantly, digital music storage popular with everyone, not just geeks like me. Digital music and infrastructures like iTunes aren't going anywhere.

Similarly, PDA devices were around long before the iPhone and iPad. But they were devices purchased by geeks like me at technical conferences - we'd spend the conference poking at them with styluses, write some code for them and then leave them to gather dust because they were annoying to use and there was no market for them. Apple's devices changed all that - PDAs and tablet devices are going to remain a part of the world's culture for many years to come.

And descendants of Mac OS X will be around in 10 years, too.

On the negative side, Apple's walled-garden ecosystem concept for devices and software will also be around for years after Jobs' passing. This consumer-hostile idea has already spread to Amazon and Microsoft.

“The point is that Apple’s device made the format and, more importantly, digital music storage popular with everyone, not just geeks like me.”

Exactly. No one uses the 1981 IBM PC anymore, but only an idiot would argue it will ever be “PC, what?” That was the watershed, and even if it had started collecting duct the next month it would live forever in history. Jobs had a bunch of watershed.

Similarly, PDA devices were around long before the iPhone and iPad. But they were devices purchased by geeks like me at technical conferences - we'd spend the conference poking at them with styluses, write some code for them and then leave them to gather dust because they were annoying to use and there was no market for them. Apple's devices changed all that - PDAs and tablet devices are going to remain a part of the world's culture for many years to come.

People forget that Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) was a term coined by Apple... for the Newton. Of course, Steve Jobs was busy founding NeXT and Pixar while PDA and Newton was being coined and invented by Apple... and he killed the Newton line when he returned to Apple.