On the day of the iPhone announcement, pundits criticized the event as lacking "panache." It was very low key, and it was held in a small auditorium on Apple's campus rather than in a larger venue off site. I think it's now apparent that the planners knew that Steve's passing was imminent and purposely kept things simple. Steve was always ahead of the curve. Apple dumped floppy disks, serial, SCSI, and its proprietary keyboard/mouse ports back in 1998. (Apple's computers never used a parallel port.) OS X Lion is installed via a download. He's also been known to wait out technologies until the time is right. Macs don't have USB 3 yet, for instance. I'm sure that technology will appear, probably when the next generation of Intel processors directly supports it. The company has eschewed Blu Ray. I'd bet that it never appears; instead, I'd bet on Mac computers dumping optical drives entirely. He was one to pay attention to detail. Even the boxes were important. This is the box that contained t-shirts given out when the most recent Berkeley store opened: http://images.macworld.com/images/article/2011/10/shirtbox-256989.jpg (source: MacWorld) ifoAppleStore.com describes the symmetry of the Berkeley store: Here's how the Apple store sales pitch works, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: Steve made some really unusual decisions, too. When Apple kicked him out back in 1985, he sold all but one share of his stock. He kept that share so he could continue to receive an annual report. That stock would be worth $29 billion today. In 1995, when Steve came back to Apple through its acquisition of his company (NeXT), he was granted 1.5 million shares of Apple stock. He promised to hold them for at least six months. Six months later, he sold them, and Apple's stock dropped 40%. That forced out CEO Gil Amelio and paved the way for Steve to take over. It's going to be interesting to see where Apple heads. Unlike the last time Steve and Apple parted ways back in 1985, I think the company will be just fine this time.