Not defending by any means, but contextualizing... much of the IT industry was/is that way, Apple is just a big target and Steve Jobs WAS Apple publicly. Game, not the player.
All that aside, the contributions to everything we now take for granted technologically (other than the internet itself) was made publicly accessible by Apple/Jobs - that's a heck of a legacy and one I hope Apple/Cook can keep momentum on.
Here are some of my Apple observations from my childhood forward, I've always been a geek and technology is something that I have watched closely for decades!
70's, computers were around and if you got to use one, you were a researcher at a big firm, or your school had huge amounts of money sunk into not only the computer, but the infrastructure to house it as well. If you had one in your home, you built it yourself - until the Apple I (I had access to university computers starting at age 6, punch cards are still a fond memory although a bit vague)
80's, computers were only for geeks - until the Macintosh which made them usable without having to know any command line syntax to use them (I still go to the command line frequently, I'm a geek).
90's, computers were in the home, but still very expensive and mostly unapproachable by a good chunk of consumers - until the iMac broke the $2K floor and made a move to appeal aesthetically to the general consumer... NO MORE BEIGE BOXES!
00's, the internet finally had steam in the home due to the wide proliferation of cheaper computers in said homes... Smart phones were out there, but too expensive to get traction. The iPhone blended technologies that were currently being used into a single device that appealed aesthetically and price point wise to a larger marketplace than the Blackberries of that time.
Oh, and Apple remained a "Made in the USA" (parts and labor) for much longer than any of their competitors, which gave them much of their larger price tag... heck , they were still 100% USA longer than Harley Davidson
So right or wrong, these are my observations of Apple's impact on the market place over the years... the Scully, et al years didn't have much impact, they were simply trying to compete against other hardware vendors, but didn't seem to realize that the OS was developed elsewhere for those competitors. All of the big tech/societal changes from Apple happened when Steve Jobs was there.
