Not really. The importance of any analysis of Apple begins from the tiny share of everything that it actually commands. The corpse of Mr Jobs makes 5.6% of the world's mobile phones, for example. Another way to think of that is that more than 94% of the people who use some such product in the world don't use his. The corpse of Mr Jobs makes more than 50% of the world's profit on handset manufacture, however. In other words, Apple is a manufacturer of luxury products, sold in small quantities at insanely inflated prices. Millions of units in a market of billions, sold to people who do not bring to the purchase any sense of the relevance of value to price, because the handbag or shoe or handset is being sold on a "personal identity facilitation" basis: you're becoming the sort of person who wears Louboutin, carries Kate Spade, or submits to Jobs. Most of the rest of us (could you say of us, given the inevitable forecast now that the wizard is dead, that we are at very least the 95%?) tend to regard the result with something like shock and disgust and something like outraged helpless boredom, as we do with all the other "let them eat cake like mine" behavior displayed all the time by the world's privileged, educated, complacent, self-absorbed, narcissistic stupid people, whose insecurities about technology and about themselves make them Apple's ideal customer.

The software on Apple’s handheld devices, now called iOS, is a critical factor that has enabled Apple to gain its stranglehold control over the market,

What stranglehold? Expensive smartphones are a tiny fraction of the world's handsets, and Android is enabling manufacturers all over the world to turn out es equivalent product at immense cost advantage. Even in its own tiny segment the iPhone is not capable of strangling a kitten, which is why the real market is becoming not smartphones but patents you can use to block your competitors smartphones, which Apple and Google are buying from other people at immensely inflated valuations at lightning speed.

propelling the company to becoming, literally, the most valuable company in the world.

No, not literally, figuratively. No one actually thinks you could sell the assets of Apple for more than the assets of IBM: we're not talking about book value. We're talking about "market capitalization," which is the number of shares outstanding multiplied by the price the last fool paid for what he bought, based (unless as a fool he invests on the greater fool theory) on his guesses about the future sales of the various companies whose "market capitalization" we are comparing.

Apple's "literal" value is slight. As you may know, it doesn't make anything. It sits atop the most complicated and far-flung supply chain in the business, assembled by the current stand-in for the Corpse Of The Greatest Businessman and Genius in the History of Humanity, Tim Cook. Mr Cook is a man who really really really knows how to buy plastic, which he used to do for Compaq before he went to become the Corpse, Etc.'s COO. Mr Cook's effort in assembling and managing this extraordinary supply chain is part of Apple's "goodwill," from an accounting point of view, like the Corpse's personal talent (which was undeniable, and is now undeniably dead) for making things primates like to stroke. These intangible assets of the business are supposed to be so much in excess of tangible book value that they enable us to guess that Apple is worth 14.46 times its annual earnings. Even though those earnings were earned before the most important segment of Apple's goodwill died a more-or-less natural death, and the business of designing the cult's artifacts has descended on one of the world's most experienced plastic-buyers.

Apple has built itself up as a proprietary, rather than “open”, company, and has actively sought to quell efforts by third parties to promote free software for use on its handheld devices. This free software seeks to provide the everyday user with the ability to perform functions and run applications not authorized by Apple, on Apple devices.

No. Untrue. Apple has never prevented free software from running on Macintosh computers. The operating system OSX is made predominantly from free software parts. Other free software runs on Macintosh computers of all types, without restriction. All software running on iOS objects must be signed by Apple, and in that sense must be permitted. Apple does not prevent third-party free software from running under iOS; it prevents software it and its telecomms partners do not want distributed for business reasons from running on iOS devices, regardless of license terms. There are other nuances, but the statement is wrong and unfair to Apple.

The dynamic between Apple and these third parties is truly unique and ironic. One of Apple’s main strategies to squash the free software movement has been to take the software developed by third parties and actually incorporate it into iOS itself.

Not so far as I know. What facts are you relying on?

After Apple includes these programs in iOS, thereby recognizing as valuable and innovative these third party programs, Apple bolsters its protections within the software code itself to prevent third parties from hacking the system and developing more useful programs.

Now we appear to be talking about jail-breaking. That raises different issues. Once again, modifying a handset so that it will run unsigned applications is orthogonal to the question of the licensing of the programs themselves. One could jail-break an iPhone and run only proprietary software there. Conversely, even on a jail-broken iPhone, any program that can run will need to use the iPhone SDK, and that SDK is not free software. Work on a free re-implementation of the iOS SDK for handset development may be proceeding, but that again would be orthogonal to the issue of jail-breaking.

Through these actions, Apple implicitly recognizes the true value third party developers bring to the iOS platform, and demonstrates that its proprietary model is not ideal for fostering true innovation.

Apple's "model" is not very well-defined by talking about the licensing of software. Apple makes luxury service platforms. Whether that model is "ideal for fostering true innovation" is irrelevant to whether it makes real money.

From the moment Apple released its handheld devices users were imprisoned. Apple restricted the devices such that any new software would come from Apple, and Apple alone.

Certainly not. The App Store was the most important step, the creation of an iTunes market for third-party software.

Not only were users unable to install third-party software, but also they were prohibited from using these phones on a network other than AT&T.

But tying handsets to networks is The American Way. That wasn't either an innovation by the Corpse or even the way it turned out at maturity. It was not part of his plan. His plan, which he couldn't execute for long, was to be unique in the mobile business by owning the customer.

To free users from this industry-created jail, an underground community of software developers, “jailbreakers,” began investigating ways to access the system disk on Apple devices and open it.

A poor way of describing what jail-breaking does. Why don't you actually describe the technology instead of giving a Windoze-lite metaphor?

These jailbreakers sought to enable third-party developers to create programs, to make them available for installation by the average user, and to allow users to operate their phones on a carrier of their choosing. The applications available for jailbroken phones were organized in a single application on the handheld device from which the users themselves could download any program from the catalog.

But that's irrelevant. That's just to say that iPhone uzers don't understand how to get software except from an App Store of some sort, so you have to make one if they're going to be able to load the software at all.

As the jailbreak process became as easy as typing in a website URL, more and more users began jailbreaking their phones. Apple viewed jailbreaking as a threat, as users began relying less on Apple to give them the programs they wanted. Apple swiftly responded with the App Store, an application distribution program managed by Apple itself, which allows users to download new applications directly onto their phone from a single online catalog.

Excuse me? You think the Corpse didn't think up the App Store until we thought up jail-breaking? You are giving him too little credit, and us too much. Where'd this history come from?

Really? I think they improved their products because they wanted to make better products. You haven't explained the reason that what you call "cut and paste" was hard in the first place, or why it would be easier to make in a jail-broken phone, so the reader doesn't have enough information to understand that the interpretation you're giving doesn't fit very well with the data. You don't point out that multitasking requires kernel modifications that are fundamental in the OS design, and that Symbian and Linux kernels were designed for it but iOS wasn't. So pressure from jail-breakers had nothing to do with the original architectural decision or the OS development roadmap, because multitasking is not a "feature" that could be implemented in userland by a jail-broken application program.

Despite your entirely Kool-Aid-based view of Apple as a business, you're altogether unreasonably hard on their technology design. They weren't being pushed around by our Free World forces at all. They were developing their products and unrolling their strategy with complete mastery of the situation, paying—as they always tended to do when the Corpse was at the controls—very little attention to anything outside the paranoid field of the Corpse's Artistic Vision.

Subsequent to implementing these innovative features developed by jailbreakers, Apple consistently reinforces its protections in its coding to prevent the jailbreakers from hacking newer versions of the device software. Further, after Apple releases software updates, those new versions must individually be jailbroken. In order for a user who has a jailbroken phone to upgrade to Apple’s newest software, the users must “restore” their device, which involves erasing all data on the device (songs, contacts, etc.), installing the new software, and re-jailbreaking the phone with an updated jailbreak program designed specifically for the new software version – an annoying, cumbersome process that often dissuades jailbroken users from even upgrading to Apple’s newest software. Again, Apple recognizes the innovation and value that developers of free software could bring to iOS when it implements innovative features developed by jailbreakers into iOS, but Apple is consistently unwilling to relinquish control over the technology and seeks to further exclude these developers from the development process and dissuade users from jailbreaking their devices.

Jailbreaking is circumvention technology that enables fair uses of copyrighted material, to be precise. A more general exception from the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions to allow anyone to circumvent technical measures preventing them from running any software they want on any computing device they have purchased would be more in line with the position you seem to be taking here. Such a request will be filed by my organization, the Software Freedom Law Center, in the current statutory DMCA-exception proceeding at the Library of Congress.

Don't put multiple drafts in sequence, for Heaven's sake. Incorporate your revisions directly on the page. Prior versions will still be accessible as History. Refactor this essay to take account of the conversation, including my comments to the draft above, and I'll read again.