[Galaxy Note 10.1 General] TheWerewolf:
Actually , yes - we would have those gadgets. We actually already did. I know because I've owned most of them at one point or another.

What Apple did was twofold - they slowly built an ecosystem understanding that it's not about the gadgets - it's about the lifestyle you build around them and that meant iTunes (the store - not the app - iTunes as an actual application is terrble) - and they are one of the few companies who understand big scale marketing.

You can't go ten minutes watching TV without seeing an Apple ad. If you believe movies and TV *everyone* owns Apple products. Heck, MI-5 in England is completely run on iProducts if the Spooks (MI-5 in North America) is to be believed. They also took advantage of a weird little concept that actually was started by Jobs back when he was with Apple the first time: that Apple products (the Mac in particular) are for creative people. This was revived in the PC vs Mac ads. But the gist of it is that everyone who believes themselves to be an aspiring writer or artist feels a need to own a Mac AND an iPad AND an iPhone...

Don't believe me? Two examples: go to The Verge and check out their 'what;s in X's bag' series. You can predict with uncanny accuracy what they'll have. A MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, an iPad, an iPhone, (bizarrely) a Moleskin papernote book, a bunch of pens and pencils, a pair of sunglasses, chewing gum. If they're a photographer, a big a$$ DSLR camera - probably a Canon....EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Actually, there was one exception... she was a gamer, I think, and wanted a hella beast of a laptop - more like a beasty desktop she could lug around. Kudos to her for breaking all stereotypes. But everyone else fit this template. The 'creative' who needed 'the best'.

Similarly, after one of Jobs' last D&P shows for the press only he asked the audience how many of them were using MacBooks.. and 60% of them were. The actual market penetration even in the US for Macs is 6.8%. The representation amongst reporters is over 8X greater than in the general population. Guess what they want to write about? The computers and products THEY own.

To show how bad this is and how desperately the media wants people to buy into this mindset... watch this hypersurreal segement on CNBC where a group of Apple oriented reporters gang up on the one lone PC using reporter.. and check out the sheer fabrication that goes on:

http://plus.cnbc.com/rssvideosearch/action/player/id/1096873496/code/cnbcplayershare

I've heard Apple fans come up with the most insane arguments: like when it was discovered that Apple's Time Capsule devices which were supposed to include "server grade" hard drives... but in fact were using consumer grade drives. When this was discussed, Apple fans were arguing that "Apple gets the hard drive maker to select the best units, so they're the same as server grade"... except that this isn't possible. There is no way to do that. The tests they run are statistical and can only identify a mean time between failures across a batch of similarly built drives - and it's done by 'burning in' the drive to make it fail faster. You'd have to have an insanely high discard rate, or test each drive one at a time - by running them until they failed.

Finally, there's the 'one to many' comparison problem. If I say 'MacOS computer', there's exactly one company who makes them. Apple. They do a very good job of building those computers. When I say 'Windows computer', theres literally *thousands* of companies making them. Some good. Some horrible. Some spectacular.Yet when comparing MacOS to Windows, the one MacOS company is ineviably compared to ALL the Windows companies by coming up with an estimated 'average' quality - or worse (as Goldman does in the above clip) picking the worst company or product. (Side note - the same game is played with iPads and iPhone compared to Android devices).

Would tablets be as prevalent today without Apple? Very hard to say to be honest. If you look at the timeline from 2002 to now, they were slowly getting more popular - Apple managed to figure out the 'breakthrough' marketing approach no one else could.

But let's not kid ourselves. Apple didn't invent the smartphone. They didn't invent the tablet. And they didn't create either market.