I believe Steve Jobs hate the idea of turning the iPod into a phone. Rejected the idea from his smartest people for a long time.

Most likely yes, maybe even by a different company

Maybe it would have been called the mePhone

There were already smartphones like BlackBerry and Danger. None of them were "the iPhone".

No but someone else would have made it eventually. Maybe a little bit later. Tech does not happen in a vacuum, even in earlier centuries the same invention happened around the same time in different parts of the world.

Definitely. Connected palm pilots / PDAs existed for years before.

Apple invented the PDA (even the term) with the Newton in 1992. Steve wasn't with the company at the time, but given the company wouldn't have existed without him it isn't really that much of a stretch to say they wouldn't necessarily exist without his influence.

You seem to subscribe to the "great man" theory of history, while the people that disagree with you subscribe to a "human dynamics" theory of history (think Hari Sheldon's psychohistory in the Foundation books). You can point at some "great man" in history and say "if it wasn't for this person's actions history would have been different", but over long enough timelines I believe some things are inevitable, given the wider context in a point in time. If Columbus hadn't convinced the Spanish crown to seek new trade routes through the West, some other individual would have enticed another colonialist European power to so, with similar results for native Americans over the following century, for example.

> You must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. ... Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.

— Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology

On the other hand you don't seem to know anything about Apple. It exists today because Jobs switched from very expensive beige boxes to affordable garish iMacs. Personally, that was unexpected. Then he bet on the iPod and the rest is history.

I don't like the cult of industrialists nor Apple really (I've always wanted a Quadra though), but he was one hell of a product manager.

According you Wikipedia, they started with Psion in the 80s

> The first PDA, the Organiser, was released in 1984 by Psion, followed by Psion's Series 3, in 1991. The latter began to resemble the more familiar PDA style, including a full keyboard

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant