Thanks, Steve

It's a sad day: only this morning I was reminiscing about my days exploring the Apple Macintosh in Palo Alto in 1984. Like much of the world right now, I'm reliving Steve Jobs's greatest hits on YouTube, I've got a bit of a tear in my eye, and yet I can't imagine how Jobs could possibly go out on a higher note than this.
Jobs took Xerox PARC's ideas about what the personal computer could be and made them reality; he brought back Apple Computer from the brink of death to being the most valuable company in the world; he created a whole new class of electronic device, with the iPad; he even reinvented the telephone. And, of course, he's still around, at least for the time being -- he'll stay on as Apple chairman (and, in one of the most touching parts of his resignation letter, as “Apple employee”).
So thank you, Steve, for everything you've done. You've relieved me of more money than I care to mention in public, and I don't begrudge you a cent of it. In fact, even with the massive run-up in Apple's share price over these past years, I've always been convinced that the best use of $1,000 or so has always been to buy an Apple computer, rather than Apple stock. The extra productivity conferred by the machine, I'm convinced, will give you a much better return on your money than any equity.
Here at Reuters, I made sure that I could work on a Mac before I accepted this job, and even though we're standardized on PCs, you see Apples all over the company, up to and including the CEO's office. None of that is going to change with Jobs's departure as CEO. Does Apple still have an outsize personality who can slice away extraneous features on hardware, say no to the demands of the marketplace, and give us not what we think we want but what we never knew we wanted? I think it does: Jony Ive fits the bill quite nicely. And Apple's amazing relations with its suppliers -- the way that it can get chips and hardware into its devices that the rest of the world can't get its hands on for any amount of money -- is now baked in to the organisation, rather than being reliant on a single man.
The formula, then, is clear. And with or without Jobs, Apple is, for the foreseeable future, going to coin simply astonishing amounts of money. It made $7.3 billion of profit just in the last quarter, on revenues of an almost unimaginable $28.6 billion. That makes Apple one of the most profitable companies the world has ever seen -- and makes its stock look almost cheap, even at a market cap of $350 billion.
No one man can be responsible for all or even most of that kind of performance. Jobs has always been the exception who proves the rule as far as the cult of the CEO is concerned -- he's one of very, very few CEOs who really did make an enormous difference to their company. But even so, he's just one guy, and he's built around him a super-talented team who know exactly what's expected of them. We're not going to see Tim Cook coming out and talking about “one more thing” at a WWDC keynote presentation, but we don't need to. Apple is a dominant company now, and is more than big enough to be able to withstand a leadership change at the top.
Today's news, and tomorrow's, will rightly be all about Jobs. But in a few years' time, I look forward to the seeing the case studies showing how Apple, seeing an entirely predictable event coming down the road, set up an elegant and model handover from Jobs to Cook. Jobs knows that he will be judged on this -- and I'm quietly confident that he's done it perfectly.

Felix Salmon is a Reuters blogger.