I’d like to steal Brian S. Hall’s words:

Like hundreds of millions of others, you have led me on a journey. I do not wish for it to end.

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.

Today’s announcement is just one more step, albeit a big and sad one, in a long-planned orderly transition — a transition that no one wanted but which could not, alas, be avoided.

Well put.

Ailing Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs said he is unable to continue at the helm of the technology giant and will step down, handing the reins of one of the world’s most valuable companies to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.

Wild. This was felt in New York, Cincinnati, and plenty of other places:

An unusual earthquake centered near Mineral startled millions of people from Maine to Georgia on Tuesday. In the end there were few reports of serious damage, with more rattling of nerves than of property.

But the tremors disrupted life in some of the nation’s biggest population centers. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from office buildings. Cellphone service was strangled as the quake led to disruptions in air traffic, halted trains, jammed roadways and gave some on the West Coast an opportunity to poke fun at Easterners who seemed panicked and uncertain of how to respond.

Now, when you Control-click (right-click) on a folder in the Finder, your new Terminal Service should appear near the bottom of the contextual menu. Use that new menu option—or your new keyboard shortcut—and Terminal will open a new window (or tab) focused right on the folder you chose.

The average sale price of Apple’s iPhone 4 is $560. Of that, $7 covers the cost of manufacturing, $178 goes to components, $7 is taken by Foxconn, and Apple walks away with the rest, or $368.

In the second quarter, Sprint blamed a decline in its contract subscribers on more pronounced “competitive headwinds,” most prominently, “the first full quarter both major competitors offered the iPhone.”

More network capacity is a good thing.

Editorial from Engadget’s editor summarizes well the competitive landscape:

But right now — in the tablet space at least — the problem for Motorola, Samsung, HP, RIM, and anyone else who is challenging Apple becomes infinitely more difficult. Almost any company could put together a more powerful or spec-heavy tablet, but all the horsepower in the world can’t help you if you don’t find a way to delight the average consumer. Those other tablet makers may have superior hardware (and in the case of the Xoom, some superior software as well), but without that key component of sheer delight, the road for them is long and hard. HP is getting close by touting features like Touch-to-Share, but against experiences like the new GarageBand for iOS and the 65,000 apps (and counting) that currently exist, it’s hard to see a clear path to sizable competition. That goes for Google and RIM as well.

The common thread in my tech frustration is products that either don’t work or make things too hard.

Apple’s stuff isn’t perfect, but they know what it means to delight. Even in the traditional space they address the things others have long since allowed to become status quo. A MacBook Air boots in about 15 seconds. You can put it to sleep and port it around like an iPad, counting on it to wake instantly whenever you need to use it. What other “traditional” PC product can say that? If Apple hadn’t done this with the MacBook Air, would there be any hope PC wake/boot time would ever be instant or even significantly improve?