Take, for instance, the decision to buy out an existing MP3 program, that was relaunched as iTunes. It was out there, and people were ripping their CD collections onto computer hard drives well before the iPod appeared, and when it duly arrived on the market sniffy comments about the majority of music on people's iPods being stolen was probably true, at least up to a point.
There certainly wasn't an easy avenue to buy content for the iPod at the time, and I can't help thinking part of the negotiating strategy as the iTunes Music Store was set up involved reminding unconvinced record company executives that here was a way to make people pay for some of the content they were consuming.
The iMac to iPod/iTunes nexus pointed out another area where Apple was running against the stream. You needed, in the conventional wisdom, to adhere to industry standards that could be run across platforms coming from a number of different manufacturers.
Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Those voices you were hearing were the voices of people who wanted things to run on their industry standard platforms.
From iPod to iPhone wasn't, when you look back on it, anything major in the quantum leap department, and neither was the step from iPhone to iPad. Each was a logical extension of existing technology delivered on a tightly controlled platform where there weren't major issues with compatibility.
Yes, you could go somewhere else, get something cheaper, maybe even find something that looked nearly as good, but when it came to getting the different bits and prices to play nicely together...
Now, there's been a bit of discussion in various sections of the interweb as to whether what Jobs and Apple have delivered us amounts to a revolution, with subsequent sidetracks into whether this was A Good Thing, but from where I'm sitting the response to those questions is fairly clear.
Revolution? Certainly.
The last twenty years have created a completely new avenue of instantaneous communication and while the process of change is nowhere near complete already we're looking at a telecommunications landscape that's very different from what we had twenty years ago.
Admittedly, we're possibly looking at the sort of landscape that might have happened anyway, but I'd question whether you'd have anything like the interwebs as we know them in a command line environment.
While Jobs and Apple didn't invent the point and click graphic user environment, they saw it and spotted where it might lead.
There's also a strong argument that suggests that we wouldn't be where we are today without a little piece of software called Hypercard, which delivered content with hyperlinks in much the same manner as we click our way through websites today.
Hypercard may not have been the first the first hypermedia application, but it was bundled with all new Macs sold after 1987 until Mr Jobs withdrew support for the program, a move that created a number of very pissed off users at the time.
I had a largish Hypercard project that was nowhere near complete and had absorbed a lot of time and effort which was, effectively, wasted, but I'm convinced that what I learned in the process was valuable once I started playing around with my website and blogs etc.