Dang it all. Is anyone listening? I hope not.

Apple has no competition. None. Zero. Zip. Zune. Nada. Scratch. The Big Goose Egg.

Pay no attention. I'm busy making money on the fact that nobody gets that. By the time the fundtards and financial punditbots figure it out, I'll be on my island in the South Pacific. Brown-skinned shirtless girls will be bringing me rum in coconut shells while I idly watch seaweed wash ashore.

There are people who are trying to sell hardware or software or services to the same people Apple does. Not "and." "Or." Only Apple makes and sells the whole widget. His Steveness has been saying that for ten years. Nobody gets that Apple's competitive edge is that they don't rely on anyone else to get it right before they can.

Microsoft is dependent on hardware makers who, in turn, can't innovate beyond Redmond. They can't innovate beyond each other in any real way, either. They all have to stay compatible with the same operating system. Their innovations are all cosmetic and meaningless.

Apple's backward OS compatibility is with its hardware, while Microsoft is backward compatible with software. A four-year old Mac will run Leopard, but you'll have to update some software. A two-year old Dell will puke Vista. But, if you can get Vista to run, it will run 10-year old software. Of course it will still be just as sucky-looking and clunky as ten-year old software should be, but it will run – sort of.

The Blackberry will sync with your Outlook calendar. The iPhone is cool. A Zune squirts DRM. An iPod is gear.

iTunes works with the cool hardware Apple builds. Lots of people use iTunes because it works great with iPods and iPhones. It also works great if you don't have an iPod or an iPhone. It works great on a Mac or a PC. It works better on a Mac, because that's its native land. You don't need iTunes to run an iPod, but it's easier if you do.

You can run Windows on a Mac, but if you do you'll start to wonder why. One day you'll wake up and forget to bother about it.

Well, I guess if I want to ramble on about this it will have to wait. I have to go to work in the morning.

Damn. I hope we're not out of Alka-Seltzer.