Audiophiles aside, Jobs is right: most, if not all people cannot tell the difference between 160 kbps and 230 kbps, much less “lossless” formats like FLAC. Take it this way: if you think that you are going to get a professional-grade audio experience out of a few hundred dollars spent on an iPod, then you should not be the person to worry about the bitrate. It is designed to listen, not to redefine. You might, might, hear a few clicks and buzzes at that quality, but nothing like a nightmare.

Taking a good average price of $4 per latte, Jobs' order would come in at a toasty $16,000! That seems like a lot for coffee, but given Apple’s $3.5 billion in income for 2007, it represented a mere 0.00045% of the company. That’s a latte!

Not only did Apple master the idea of touchscreen, but added multi-touch, a technology which lets more than one finger interact with the screen at once. WHile Microsoft would later go on to revolutionize “infinite touch,” Apple started the ballgame.

Apple has famously continued the tradition of pricing all of its new technology at almost the exact same cost as the previous generation. Ignoring inflation, the price consistency is remarkable alone – technological leaps parallel profitability. This is a glimpse inside Apple as a machine – the company so obsessed with quality that they pair unveilings with exact technological improvements.

Jobs knew the reality from the start of the idea: by shifting “computer” technology into a phone, TV, and mp3 player, the idea of a standalone computer faded. Apple was the harbinger of change, making the old name “Apple Computer” dated by default.

Apple was not the first, but by far the best. Some 200,000 phones equipped with touch screens had already shipped before the keynote. What made the iPhone different? How well it worked.

Apple’s screen was so intelligently rendered that the finger stopped being the bulky “stylus” of before and became a precise tool. That was the level of dedication that others had yet to do.

Once a product ships, when it is not digital, it is permanently as upgraded as it will ever get. You can upgrade software endlessly, but hardware is fixed: the new button for checking email will never magically appear overnight on your phone.

What often gets labeled as Apple’s “minimalist” take is actually a reflection of this concept. By stripping away as much non-modifiable hardware as possible and bring these features into the software, they reduced the size and profile of the phone to something very clean. The difference is startling.

Jobs was not kidding. Before the iPhone, the concept of a “smartphone” was limited to basic web browsing, contact storage, widgets, and games. This was Palm’s territory, business-oriented organization features that normal phones lacked.

That all changed with the iPhone. Not only did it completely revamp the technology, it was unlike any single device ever made. Many companies, such as Samsung, came close, but few were able to combine even a touch screen and web browser.

Siobhan itself is an old Irish name, but it seems that the singer is referring to someone in particular. In Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunstorm, a character named Siobhan McGorran aims to cover Earth with a giant shield, perhaps “inking the sky.”