Why? Was Steve Jobs literally the only human who was capable of seeing the massive unserved demand that existed back then?

Sidekick was amazing for its time, but only on one also-ran carrier. BlackBerry had great features like BBM (essentially iMessage) but underpowered for multimedia and more difficult to learn. If Apple was out of business, one or more companies would have made the billions on MP3 players that iPod made, and any of them could have branched into phones and made a splash the same way. Perhaps Sony, perhaps Microsoft. Microsoft eventually figured it out -- the only reason they failed was that they waited for both Apple and Android to become entrenched so in this timeline they could have been the second-mover, but unlike with Apple and Android, maybe neither MS nor Google would have automatically owned the US marketshare the way Apple does[1]. If that were the case, we may have competition, instead of the unhealthy thing we have where Apple just does whatever they want.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

With all due respect theres a simple answer to why Apple was destined to win the smartphone race - they had a 5 year lead over everyone else because they had the OS and touch interface tightly integrated. On top of that they managed to scale up the production of the glass necessary for the touch to work and partnered with a network provider to overcome the control network providers had over handset producers.

They had such a lead that nobody was going to catch up and eat into their economic profits. Sure Samsung et al have captured marketshare, but not eaten into Apples economic profits.

Whether you like it or not, this hard work, effort and creativity deserves to be rewarded - in the form of monopoly/oligopoly profits.

Apple has shown itself to be very disciplined with its cash. That cannot be said of for Google, who instead of taking an endless stream of vanity projects, should return that cash back to shareholders.