Well, then I suppose it's a good thing that Steve reportedly left the company with a four year roadmap of products.

I think what I was trying to say and how it is being interpreted are two very different things ...

Between the people I know, I know iPad, Motorola Xoom, Asus Transformer, Blackberry Playbook, and Acer Iconia Tabs (the one I own) owners. By buyers remorse I mean that most people have expressed that they would have waited a couple of years before buying a tablet because, while the see the potential, tablets are just a fancy toy at the moment. They're great for playing Angry Birds, surfing the web while you watch TV, watching videos on the go, or reading an ebook but if you want to do something practical at best you can find a bunch of poorly written buggy apps with limited features that are designed for a phone.

This (of course) will change, and it has inspired a few of us to look at the Android API to develop the apps that really should exist, but the people I know bought these devices because they thought they would be good for something they really aren't. Between a small business owner, a sales representative, a photographer, a few gym-rats, and several programmers none have been able to do what they purchased the device to do. The fact that I'm constantly asked to write apps for people because they can't find anything adequate tells me that people are not really all that happy with what is available.

I think you missed my point on the connected TV ...

With how many XBox 360's, PS3's, Wii's, set-top boxes, media centers, PCs, Laptops, Ebook Readers, smart-phones and tablets are on the market and all of the video on demand/streaming services that already exist what "killer-app" can apple provide for a connected TV that other devices are not or could not offer? Beyond what already exists, and knowing what I know about how backwards thinking the telecommunications/cable companies and broadcast networks are, I just don’t see the potential in the market.

Because, outside of the 360, no one is even close to getting it right and even the 360 has a lot of room for improvement. People were making smartphones before the iPhone came along but that didn't stop Apple from looking at the problem from the outside in and creating an innovative solution to peoples' issues with these phones.

Imagine a connected TV that can stream from Hulu, Netflix, and broadcast networks while renting or buying movies and shows from the iTunes Store. It also has streaming NBA, MLB, and NHL games along with things I'm not even thinking of here.

Now imagine that all of this is controlled seamlessly by Siri with a stored index (a la Spotlight). There's no more browsing through menus and fucking around with trying to figure out where something is and how to find it. You say "play Criminal Minds" and Siri searches for all episodes of the series across all platforms and displays them for you. You say "play the third episode" and bam, you're there, watching the show you want in ten seconds. People will pay for that and that's probably only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to where television can go with modern technology.

If you remember way back to 2006, the CEO of RIM actually laughed at the iPhone and said "Apple has never made a phone before. We're not worried." Think he regrets that now? When it comes to revolutionary technology, there's no company in the world that even comes close to Apple. You can argue that they're terrible at the evolutionary part of tech that follows but when they enter a market, they enter with a giant fucking bang.

In the next two years Apple will get irrelevant again. Perhaps they will come back to light in 5 years or so. They did it several times in the last 30 years.

So they're the leading tablet and smartphone manufacturer, second in PCs, and they'll be irrelevant in two years.

I'd love to see that roadmap to success.

So many of you are confusing "what I want" with "reality".

People forget how quickly a company's fortunes can change. One only need look at Nintendo and Sony to see how quickly things can go wrong.

Apple's only problem currently is that they only make their iOS for their own phones, whereas Google is taking the Windows approach and focusing on getting their OS on as many platforms as possible. Frankly, I've seen this movie before. Eventually, the Android OS IS going to be the dominant force in both the cell phone and tablet markets.

Of course, the real question is how much this may matter. Unlike in the PC market, I do think Apple has built up enough goodwill with consumers to keep what happened to them in the PC market happen to them in the tablet and phone markets. That being said, over the next decade I do think we will see Android become the main focus of many software developers, and see iOS become the secondary focus, if a focus at all, for many developers.

BTW,  Apple will do just fine without Steve Jobbs, imo. Unless their sales were linked to his personality, we need to remember that one man doesn't make a company. The people who work under him do.

i think what what every fails to see her is that if apple turns to shit and suddenly starts losing money they could easily keep them selves afloat for the next 10 years losing. so there going to be up there for a long time as much as i dont like them. there good.

It has nothing to do with any reality distortion, Apple simply has had a lot of compounding luck over the past 10-15 years. This isn't any different from Sony having a lot of luck with their electronics and the PS1/PS2 in the past, Microsoft having a lot of luck with DOS/Windows/Office and Nintendo having a lot of good luck with the Gameboy lineup to the DS and Wii. Over time the performance of a particular company whether good or bad will typically regress towards the mean. What this means is that whether Steve Jobs is heading Apple or not you could expect their performance will not stay as outrageously good over time just as the performance of the other companies I have mentioned has fluxuated up and down over time and all of them seemed untouchable for a while. 

While this is definitely true to an extent, people are ignoring key differences between smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Windows kicked the shit out of Apple because they were (like Apple) on the emerging side of the PC market. Where smartphones (and, to a lesser extent, tablets) differ is that PCs were driven by a very strong push in the business community. People bought Windows machines because they were introduced to the operating system in their place of business. Windows' open nature made it the only viable option for business use and businesses were the first to start using desktop computers on a large scale. So, naturally, this filtered into the home over the course of the following years.

Smartphones started as a business product but quickly shifted to the consumer space, MUCH more quickly than the PC market. Apple led the way in this regard and before Blackberry entrenched itself into users' minds, the iPhone had surpassed it on a consumer scale that dwarfed the business side of things. Now, smarphones (and again, to a lesser extent tablets) are mainly a consumer product without a significant push from the business side of the equation driving the market toward a single platform. So if Apple stays competitive in the consumer space, they'll be just fine over the long run. Will Android take most of the market? Absolutely. But we won't see the crazy 95/5 split we saw in the PC space in the 90s and early 2000s. Probably more like a 40/25/10/10/the rest type of situation as Android gains some market, Apple loses some, and the rest catch up.