He was a genius and a visionary with an amazing track record of picking winners.
The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs embraced what was counter-intuitive, opting to zig where others zagged.
"A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them," he said in 1997, taking a verbal sledgehammer to the concepts of market research, focus groups and customer feedback.
So in 2010, when some smartphone manufacturers began supersizing their screens beyond the 3.5-inch iPhone standard, Jobs' takedown was loud and clear.
"You can't get your hand around it," he scoffed. "No one's going to buy that."
"Hummers", he labelled them, referring to the obese variant of the SUV, which briefly enjoyed a stint in the popular culture spotlight before hitting the skids.
With that take, Jobs painted Apple into a corner, allowing others - notably Samsung - to snatch a rare head start in a new product category.
Although the shadow of Jobs continues to hang over Apple, the company's new management has begun to jettison some of the taboos.
In 2012, just a year after Jobs died, Apple released a smaller version of the iPad, the mini.
Jobs had described tablets with smaller screens as "tweeners" that would be "DOA - dead on arrival".
But late last year, Apple finally jumped into the "phablet" market with the launch of the iPhone 6 Plus.
Today's results show how Steve Jobs got it wrong, big time.
Apple blew away all market estimates, shipping a record 74.5 million iPhones in the three months to the end of December, the first quarter to reflect the sales of the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus.
And although the company did not break out sales of particular models, the 8 per cent leap in the iPhone average sales price suggests that the bigger, more expensive phone was a key factor.
What began as an Asian phenomenon has now been adopted in the West and suddenly the jumbo phone era is upon us and it's going from strength to strength.
Market research firm IDC expects phablet shipments in 2015 to almost double to 318 million units. And according to researchers at Telsyte, one in five Australian smartphone owners could be using a phablet by 2016.
Today's news puts Apple within a whisker of reclaiming the crown of the world's biggest smartphone maker, a position it lost to Samsung in 2011, according to IDC.
Perversely, the head start hasn't done Samsung any favours.
It also comes a few months after Samsung reported a rotten quarterly result, the blame for which rests with its faltering mobile phone division. Cheaper smartphones using Google's Android operating system have had a far bigger impact on Samsung's market share than on Apple's.
And yes, these jumbo phones are difficult to handle and operate with one hand on a bus or train, but more screen real estate and longer battery life more than makes up for that slight inconvenience.
In hindsight, Apple's Frankenstein iPhone has turned out to be more humdinger than Hummer.
