By Paul Turner, author of 'Insanely Doomed: Why Apple Will Crash Without Steve Jobs'.
The numbers are truly mind-boggling. In the first two weeks of this month, Apple was adding nearly $9 billion a day to its market value. By itself, the company is worth more than the entire listed retail sector in the US. It is now by far the largest business in the world - indeed, it ranks among the largest the world has ever seen.
And yet, it is less than six months since Steve Jobs, the industrial genius who created Apple, and drove it forward relentless, sadly died. When he passed away, there was a question nagging away at anyone who followed Apple. Would this still be the same company without Jobs in charge?
The stock market appears to have decided that it will be - and that is might be even greater. The men in charge of Apple, led by its chief executive Tim Cook, can push the business forward without him. The new iPad can take over the computer market, and Apple can move on relentless, ripping up the film and television and publishing industries as it did the music and cell-phone markets.
But can Apple really survive without Steve Jobs in charge?
The argument of my new book 'Insanely Doomed' is that it can't.
There are two types of entrepreneur. A man such as Henry Ford creates an entirely new system for making things. Once he was gone, the system endured, and Ford could carry on as the leader of the global auto industry for decades afterwards.
By contrast, a man such as Dr An Wang just creates a whole series of fantastic products - from calculators to word processors.
Wang who, I hear you ask? Well, that is precisely the point. It was one of the most significant companies of the technology industry in the 1970s and 1980s - but faded away once its founding genius was no longer in charge.
Apple could easily go the same way.
Jobs was brilliant, no one questions that. From the early days of the personal computer revolution, and then with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, he was so far ahead of the rest of his industry it was impossible for his competitors to keep up.
But he also created a precarious business model.
Apple is critically dependent on its products being perceived as the coolest, best-designed, most innovative on the market. But it is very hard to be cool when you are the biggest company in the world.
And Apple is crucially dependent on the almost 50% profit margins it makes on its devices. It has to carry on being able to charge very, very high prices - because if it slips down to a more normal 10% or 20% profit margin then its vast profits will collapse. But it is very hard to maintain those margins forever.
Steve Jobs could keep both going. He was a brilliant innovator and salesman. But, unlike Ford, he didn't create a new system. The company depended on his vision and instincts - and on his ability to market its products.
When he was alive, Jobs used to describe his devices as 'insanely great'. But right now the only thing that is insane is the way everyone expects that Apple will be the same company without Jobs in charge.
'Insanely Doomed: Why Apple Will Crash Without Steve Jobs' is published by Endeavour Press.