If you read the biography and came to that conclusion, then it's incredibly unfortunate because the opposite was true. Jobs surrounded himself with the best engineers and often flipped positions based on their arguments. If you read or hear any of his interviews, he always talks about the team and how foolish it is to think one person could do everything.
Perl is perfectly readable, and in many cases elegant. The creator is even a trained linguist. Sure it's possible to write unreadable perl, just like it's possible to make a mess in any language, but I'd say perl is as readable in general as python.
The obvious thing is the amazing software coupled with a touchscreen that actually worked. And I don't mean sorta worked, as long as you used a stylus and whacked it hard enough like the Palm Pilot, I mean you glide your hand on the screen and it reacts like a physical piece of paper being dragged around. Nothing like this existed before the iPhone and all smartphones today are clear descendants.
They can get a very rough idea of the places you've been. But if they've stolen your phone, getting access to a list of cell towers you've been near isn't very much of a breach compared to all of your email, bookmarks, facebook, twitter, all of your contacts, etc. The whole thing is a very silly argument and Apple has already addressed it; so lets stop spreading FUD, please.
Pull-to-refresh makes sense when adding new cells to the top of a UITableView (as in a timeline), but it doesn't make sense as a general refresh gesture as they show in their example. Hopefully it won't start being abused too much.
Emacs has M-x compile, which also does debugger integration. You can edit the build file(s) directly, it's not that hard. I'm sure vim has the same thing.
Isn't that even more reason to check it for correctness? I know when I write in German I do at least two proof readings before I send it out into the wild, preferably after checking with a native speaker.
I disagree, we can use the past to inform the future so it's not the same as religion. I think it's a much better bet to say that devices like the iPad will be more popular 5 years from now than to bet that they're going away. Sure it's silly to put specific numbers to it, but we can estimate the broad strokes to a better than chance accuracy.
I just graduated from a decent CS program, but I find it hard to believe that most people applying for a programming job couldn't explain binary search trees or quickly think through how to reverse a linked list.