Worse, though, that line of thinking betrays a lack of insight into the way that Apple--and, frankly, Steve Jobs--has acted. For all of the iconic Apple co-founder's achievements--and there were --his most lasting accomplishment may be how he prepared Apple to thrive long after he had left the company.

Remember that Jobs had already left Apple once in his career--and not at all by choice. In a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs came out on the losing end, with the company's board of directors forcing him out amid sluggish Mac sales.

Jobs subsequently said that getting fired from Apple turned out to be "the best thing that could have ever happened to me." After his departure from Apple, he would found Next (which produced many of the technologies at the heart of Apple's Mac platform today) and purchase Pixar. The firing "freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life," Jobs would tell Stanford University students during a .

It also likely gave him perspective on the company he co-founded, which would serve him well when he returned to a now-struggling Apple as interim CEO in 1997. That perspective was further honed by a cancer diagnosis in 2004. "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," Jobs said in his Stanford speech. "Because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."