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"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50. Apple II is obsolete now. Apple I was obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years. This is not a field in which one writes a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries, or builds a church that will be admired and looked at with astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in ten years it's obsolete, and really will not be usable within 10 or 20 years."

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To celebrate your accomplishment, you really should treat yourself to lunch. I’d recommend the house-ground wagyu beef cheeseburger with triple crème Brie and caramelized onion aioli at Alison Eighteen, a nearby restaurant -- though at $17, it doesn’t come cheap. Still, with the amount of money you just saved by parking at a $3.50-per-hour spot on the street, you’ll have no trouble covering the lunch bill. And while you’re savoring your $23.53 in savings, as well as the last of your “frites” (they don’t call them “fries” when you’re paying this much for them), ponder this question: What, do you suppose, is the “fair market value” of a one-hour parking spot in this part of town?

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On Monday, Thomas and his mom learned that he is in esteemed company as a high-school dropout with a knack for computers: David Karp, 26, sold Tumblr, the online blogging forum he created, to Yahoo for $1.1 billion.

Examples of tech geniuses who lack college degrees are well-known — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg among them. But Karp left high school after his freshman year, with his mother's blessing, at the tender age of 14.

Critics say dropping out of school to pursue a dream is a terrible idea. Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford Law School who teaches and advises startup companies, says it's like "buying a lottery ticket — that's how good your odds are here. More likely than not, you will become unemployed. For every success, there are 100,000 failures."

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The malaise stems from multiple sources. Apple hasn't delivered any mind-blowing new products lately. Apple seems to be rolling out bloated, buggy software with greater frequency, making decisions for crass, commercial reasons rather than purity of style, design and function. Apple's stock price has been falling. In one of the nicest touches, Depellis quotes one Apple blogger as comparing "the feeling to a lefty's disillusionment after the election of Barack Obama: 'Well, I still like this guy's platform better than the other guy's platform. But I'm really kind of disappointed with what I see.'"

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Wozniak happened to pick up a copy of Esquire from his mother’s kitchen table the day before starting classes at Berkeley in the fall of 1971. Rosenbaum’s article “described a whole web of people who were doing this: the phone phreaks. They were anonymous technical people who went by fake names and lived all over the place,” he recalls. They were “outsmarting phone companies and setting up networks that nobody imagined existed.” It seemed unbelievable. And yet, he says, “I kept reading it over and over, and the more I read it, the more possible and real it sounded.”

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I feel particularly qualified to review this film since I had been a friend of Steve's for  30 years and had worked with him during the period covered by the film except for the very early days of Apple I and Apple II. I was surprised that I had personally known, and worked with, nearly all the people who were portrayed in the film.

If you are interested in what motivated Steve Jobs, one of the great entrepreneurs of our time, or what he was like, or how he dealt with the people around him, then I highly recommend seeing the movie "Jobs." Director Joshua Michael Stern and his team did exhaustive research into the history of Steve's involvement with Apple, and reviewed hundreds of hours of film featuring Steve. I am convinced that the slight omissions or inconsistencies in the film were only due to the need to keep the flow and pace of the story intact, and not due to errors in research.

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And it works, too.

While you can't make a call on it, the monument features an interactive touchscreen, high-resolution photographs and videos of speeches and other moments from Jobs' life. Another apparent difference from the real thing: There are currently no reports of the device freezing for no reason.

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I drove in a mild panic to the nearest Verizon Wireless store and met with a sales representative. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he sighed.

“You can get a new phone,” he said. “At retail price.”

“How much is that?” I asked.

“Four hundred fifty dollars.”

Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,” he said.

I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape players, anything I could get my hands on.

But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.

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So why is the once-unstoppable favorite suddenly in such a fix?

Yes, Apple is up some 25 percent for the year. But it was only four months ago when the price per share sat at $700.

In the New York Times, economist Edward Zabitsky suggested that "as Samsung has surpassed Apple as the leading handset maker, apps have become more important than the devices that carry them, and handsets are increasingly being evaluated on their ability to access the cloud and interact with other devices." Zabitsky, long bearish on Apple, suggested those trends are bad news for Apple's long-term competitive situation.

In Business Insider, Henry Blodget posited several theories, many of them also suggesting concern that Apple's long dominance may be waning as the smart phone market evolves and lower-priced -- and lower-profit margin -- phones take a larger piece of the annual sales.

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Apple began selling the iPhone 5 on Sept. 21, the same day the company's stock hit an all-time peak of $705.07 per share. Since then, the stock has plunged nearly 25 percent, trimming the company's market value by more than $150 billion. On Friday, the stock fell almost 3 percent and closed at $533.25.

The sell-off has had broad impact. It has reached beyond Apple's own stockholders because the company is the largest component in the Standard & Poor's 500 and Nasdaq composite index - two benchmarks that are tracked by widely held mutual funds and exchange traded funds, or ETFs.

Apple comprises 4 percent of the S&P 500 and nearly 12 percent of the Nasdaq, according to FactSet. The Nasdaq has shed 6 percent since Apple's stock price peaked while the S&P 500 has declined 3 percent, the same as the Dow Jones industrial average, which doesn't include Apple in its basket of 30 stocks.

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Last year, President Obama candidly asked Steve Jobs about the outsourcing of almost all Apple manufacturing jobs overseas.“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs reportedly told the president. But, according to Cook's announcement, Apple has not abandoned American manufacturing.

"We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States,” the CEO told NBC's Brian Williams. Cook told Businessweek that Apple -- the biggest company in the world by market value -- had a responsibility to create U.S. jobs. He did, however, note that the U.S. education system is failing to produce enough people with the skills needed for modern manufacturing processes.

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The movie premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013.

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Sorkin also revealed the last time he spoke with the late technologist, Jobs wanted Sorkin to write a Pixar movie. "I didn't think I'd be able to make an inanimate object talk," Sorkin said. Jobs responded, "Once you make them talk, they won't be inanimate anymore."

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Last month, after a strong jobs report showed the unemployment rate dropping below 8 percent, conservatives at Fox and beyond convinced themselves that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was pulling some funny business to boost the president a month before the election. This morning, BLS released its new monthly report, and it’s more good news: The economy added 171,000 jobs in October, almost 50,000 more than economists expected, and the previous two months’ reports were revised upward to the tune of 84,000 additional jobs.

So did the patriots at Fox News let out a whoop that more Americans had found jobs last month? Nope. In the first hour after the report came out, they found every possible way to spin the news as bad for Obama and good for Mitt Romney. When announcing the numbers, the Fox personalities always focused not on the number of new jobs added, but the fact that the unemployment rate ticked up from 7.8 to 7.9 percent, mentioning the 171,000 new jobs almost as an afterthought.

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They don’t care about the evening chill, or the stares of passerby, or the police. And the police don’t care about them. Because on that bright morning when the Apple store opens, they’ll roll up their blankets, strike their tents, and go home with a shiny new iPhone 5, as happy as clams and just as stupid.

To liberals of the 90s, Bill Gates was the symbol of both wealth and malevolence incarnate. Not only was he the richest man in the world, but his monolithic and monopolistic enterprise was based on a mediocre product with built in buggy obsolescence. He didn’t innovate; instead he partnered with IBM, purchased DOS, and then exploited both. And through ruthless business savvy, the narrative goes, Microsoft strong-armed the market despite a middling product, terrible customer service, and ruthless cost cutting.

But one man, one company, made a career (and cult) out of this “critique” of Bill Gates.

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I knew exactly what I wanted -- an 11-inch MacBook Air for my departing-to-college daughter. I was ably assisted in the purchase by a bright young woman. When she asked me if I had any proof of my daughter's college student status, so as to qualify for a discount, I was able to pull up a billing email on my iPhone that satisfied her. I didn't have to stand in line -- she rang me up (although I daresay such archaic terminology is hardly appropriate to the Apple checkout experience) right in front of the table upon which the MacBook Airs rested, in all their aerodynamic glory.

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Really, Apple? Haven't we suffered enough? The news drove Slate's normally calm and measured Farhad Manjoo into a froth of rage and sarcasm. I feel his pain. Just two months ago, my children gave me a Sony "Dream Machine" docking station for my iPhone 4S that works very nicely as a combination clock radio/stereo. But if I dare upgrade to the iPhone 5, I would have to plunk down an additional $29 for what Manjoo describes as an "ungainly" adapter to keep my Dream Machine functional. Yes, Farhad, I agree, that is indeed "the definition of being unfriendly to your customers."

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