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The iPod sucess is going to be difficult for Apple to substain. Besides the iPod, Apple doesn't have anything else that is growing. I have an iPod myself (1st generation) and using it in a car is kind of a pain. I did a road trip from California to Montana over the 4th of July weekend and got a chance to listen to a good number of the songs burnt onto iPod - there are about 40 CDs worth. Put it on random pick and let the hours slip by. There were some numbers played that I'd forgotten about. Compare that to a 6 CD changer. Using that round dial while driving is downright distracting.

Much superior and much simpler carrying around one's music collection without hassle. With a bigger hard drive, one will be able to carry around books on tape, and even movies to plug into a local device - be it someone else's house, or the back seat of the minivan for the kids to watch.

That said, iPod like devices will be commodifed soon. It's inevitable. Does anybody think that General Motors, Toyota or Ford is going let some company get a royalty stream going on their products? I don't. It would surprise me greatly if something wasn't in the works as we speak.

As for Steve Jobs, he just another guy. His strengths are that he understands that being nice doesn't get the job done, and that underneath the facade, he knows that he is just another guy. Big ego thogh :-)

Besides the iPod, Apple doesn't have anything else that is growing.

Wrong. Apple just had their best 3rd quarter in 8 years.

There is a worldwide shortage of Macs because Apple and IBM can't make them fast enough to meet the demand.

The way to get around that is to buy an in-dash auto CD player that supports MP3s. They're not very expensive now, and they're just now coming out with DVD-ROMs that play MP3s as well.

If you cut the bandwidth down, you can get an astounding amount of audio on a single CD. I've got a BBC radio play of Lord of the Rings (all three books) that has 13 one hour episodes on a single CD. And for music, you can easily get about 7 hours on a single 700MB CD. Imagine how much you could get on a dual layer DVD! Mark