However the brilliance of Steve Jobs was his insight that the masses are basically too lazy to educate themselves about choices and choose. So he took control, built a device, then convinced people it's exactly what they needed.
That choices are bad and dangerous. He was right, look at the empire he's built from people's complacency.
I completely disagree. The brilliance of Steve Jobs was recognizing the laziness of carriers and the complacency of manufactures.
1) He recognized the carriers had way too much saying in the phone design
2) He recognized the carriers combined their power with the sense of choice for the consumers: they had a lot of different phones, but all made to carrier's specification and wants, nothing that threatened the carriers' business
3) He recognized the time was ripe for a multitouch display phone that has a usable web browser.
4) Then the app store a year later
With the introduction of a true carrier-agnostic (mostly anyway) mobile platform, Apple single handedly changed the value emphasis on the mobile devices and showed people that touch screen phone is actually highly usable especially when combined with a competent web browser.
The Nexus series has been Google's attempt to bypass the carriers while providing the reference model for developers, but as far as I can tell, the series has been a wee bit disappointing in terms of sales because they often don't get the full backing of the carriers' sales channel. If I remember correctly Google had to cancel the Nexus One web only sales because it wasn't selling enough.
The new Nexus will sell well but I think it'll be largely be the repetition of the first Nexus One: Good phone and a landmark in terms of specs, but its sales number will probably be eclipsed by other Android phones that are better marketed by carriers who like to push "exclusive" models, let alone the iPhone. Of course, on the internet there'll probably be an endless amount of praises on how the new Nexus Prime is so much better than the iPhone and the "masses" are just too dumb and buy the iPhone instead of the superior Nexus Prime, just as with the Nexus One.
