Apple didn't have the app store and it's 30% rake of all transactional revenue at the time. Jobs was somewhat notorious about being adamantly opposed to something one day and then announcing to the world that Apple had created a best-in-class product that he previously said they would never make. I seem to recall him saying they would never make a tablet device -- that it wasn't so critical to surf the web on the toilet as people seemed to think it was. Until the iPad was ready for launch. And we learned in the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs that the iPad project existed before the iPhone project did!

Also don't forget his famous comments on no one will watch video on small screens and no need for big phones. I don't think any of his comments were lack of insight, rather it was him playing the market until he was ready.

Come on, so even his mistakes were not mistakes?

I'm not an apply fan by any means, but when they were already working on it internally, while he was publicly trashing the idea -- yes.

Steve would have been trying very hard to avoid the 'Osborne Effect', which was very well known to everyone in the early industry. Osborne portable/luggable computers had a very strong market share and growing, based on the CP/M operating system. They announced that they would be coming out with a DOS-compatible machine, far too early as it turned out. Everyone decided to wait for the introduction of the DOS machine, sales and revenue went to effectively zero, and the company died before it ever introduced the new machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-amazing-rise-and-fall-of-...

I'm the first one to criticize apple, but in this case they were clearly privately working on the things he was bashing in public. The only apple product I own is a macbook pro, so not your typical apple fanboy.

Basically yes. This is his famous "reality distortion field."

Indeed. Somehow people even manage to forget that he died of a typically curable cancer because of his hubris.

Pancreatic cancer is serious business. It's not "typically curable" by any stretch. The 5-year survival rate is 1% - 15% depending on how early it's detected.

That said, his holistic approach to treatment didn't help him at all.

He had a neuroendocrine islet tumor, not pancreatic adenocarcinoma. It has a much higher survival rate... as long as you don't try to treat it with acupuncture.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

The Plus-sized phones didn't launch until after Jobs passed away, iirc.