It's not hard to imagine why the Cupertino, Calif.-based firm would have an issue with Appleyard's efforts. Much as Steve Jobs is described as a man of two parts in the piece (Appleyard calls them "Good Steve" and "Bad Steve"), Apple's public perception is of a similar fissure.

The adulation heaped on the company's products by adoring bloggers and reporters and gadget reviewers is tempered by a growing number of stories critical of the Apple's culture of institutionalized secrecy and obsession with controlling its message. This reached a fevered pitch with the sad (and still lingering) press orgy concerning Jobs's health. It has also extended to the company's handling of some high-profile consumer issues, such as the price reductions of the initial iPhone and, more recently the mounting dissatisfaction with the service and support for the device offered by Apple and its telecom partner, AT&T.

"Along with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple's signature products," Appleyard writes, supporting the thesis with descriptions of the police-state control of the workplace, where misinformation is carefully circulated to certain Apple employees by way of baiting a trap. When the leak shows up in one of the many ravenous blogs that stalk the company, its source is easy to find.

The piece rehashes stories like the sad demise of Sun Dayong, the 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese firm that manufactures Apple gear, who recently jumped to his death from his twelfth-story apartment after one of the iPhone prototypes in his charge went missing, providing a wellspring of speculation about the sinister effects of Apple's institutional secrecy. Or Ellen Stankborough, whose iPod Touch exploded and, after her father lodged a complaint with the company, was offered a replacement in exchange for the family's silence on the matter. Her father declined Apple's offer.

In a company driven more than any other by the cult of personality surrounding its authoritarian leader, it may be, as Appleyard and many others have suggested, that unbundling the person Jobs from the company Apple is simply too much to ask. At least as it stands today.

"My own view is that a Jobsless Apple will seek a merger with Google," Appleyard tentatively asserts. This prediction, which comes at the end of a thorough and highly entertaining piece, is supported by scant reasoning. Appleyard trots through the list of product lines in which Google and Apple now compete (mobile, operating system, Web browser), and reminds us that it was this very convergence that raised concerns with regulators at the Federal Trade Commission over the two board members the companies share, a probe that ultimately led to Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepping down from Apple's board.

But a merger?

"The loss of Jobs's genius for products would mean Google's innovation and Apple's design and market sense would be a very good fit, although antitrust regulators might disagree," Appleyard suggests, rather unconvincingly (except for the bit about the regulators). But the purpose of such a lengthy journalistic exercise was not to make predictions. More to the point, the fate of Apple post-Jobs has been the subject of the sort of rampant speculation that could only surround a company supported by fans with loyalty on a par with the most ardent members of Red Sox nation. Without them, and the products they covet, there would be no market for the speculation, and Apple would simply be another humdrum company whose communications department makes life frustrating for reporters. And no one writes 4,300-word profiles about those.