Rumors that Apple would go bankrupt were rife, so I led with that question. The executive looked me in the eye.

"We have a user-base of fifty million," he said. "We're not going anywhere."

I knew what I meant, because I was one of those fifty million. Before smartphones, when Net access was via dial-up modems which blazed at 56 Kbps (if you were lucky), I'd been using the Mac for a decade. Now, it's 25 years.

Apple's user-base is uncountable now. Execs entranced with the iPad decide to get a Macbook Air for a family-member, then buy a second for themselves. A sample of recent quotes from Macworld UK:

"Apple now sells one device for every two Windows devices, revealing that Microsoft's huge advantage in the platform wars has rapidly decreased since the early 2000s, when the ratio was 56 Windows devices to every one Apple device."