"We don't think the PC is dying at all," Jobs said during his 2001 Macworld Expo keynote where he discussed Apple's digital hub strategy. "It's evolving."

Apple's retail strategy evolved as well. In 2001, the company opened up its first retail stores, at a time when other PC makers--most notably Gateway--were stumbling with brick-and-mortar outlets. A decade later, Apple now operates more than 300 stores around the globe. The stores first turned a profit in 2004; last year, they recorded $9 billion in retail sales with $2.4 billion in retail profit. More significant, as Apple likes to point out in its quarterly earnings report, 50 percent of the people buying computers at the Apple Store are first-time Mac customers.

"People just don't want to buy personal computers any more," Jobs said in a 2001 video introducing the stores and their philosophy. "They want to know what they can do with them. And we're going to show to them exactly that."

Four years after the introduction of OS X, Jobs and Apple instituted another transition--this one away from the PowerPC architecture to chips built by Intel. It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. "As we look ahead... we may have great products right now, and we've got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come," Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. "[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map."

The transition went much faster--and much smoother--than anyone, including Apple, had anticipated, thanks in large part to Rosetta. The dynamic translator let applications designed for PowerPC systems run on Intel-based Macs, giving developers time to revamp their products for Apple's Intel-based future. In fact, PowerPC apps only became obsolete this summer when Apple retired Rosetta with the introduction of Mac OS X Lion.