Obviously, this opinion has aged like milk. In the author's defense, Apple had, at the time, a remarkable history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Remember it had only been a decade since Microsoft bailed out Apple with $150M. Apple is only a juggernaut in hindsight.

By 2008, Apple had built some really nice computers that had brought them back from the edge of death, and the iPod was obviously a big hit, but neither of those would necessarily lead one to believe that they could make such a big splash in the cell phone industry. Most people who believed that the iPhone would be huge at the time were Apple true-believers.