Well, the thing was that Stever Jobs and Bill Gates pretty much invented the modern PC and most of the electronic infrastructure we see today. They pretty much started out working out of a basement, and managed to churn out the first apple computer, even getting them into almost every school in the US. There was a famous falling out between the two. They even did a movie about it called "Pirates Of Silicon Valley" back in the day.The_root_of_all_evil said:
It's like asking why Nikola Tesla, or Thomas Edison have followings, it just seems odder that these guys have followings because they are still alive, though it can be argued that they were similarly influential, and Apple was the original company.
While Steve was arguably just as big a jerk, the bottom line is that when they had their falling out Bill took his operating system into the big leagues and formed "Microsoft" which was a huge, ruthless, corperate empire while Apple was nearly dead. It was easy to cast Steve in the role of the wronged little guy and see Apple's survival as sort of heroic for a long time. In more recent years with Apple getting bigger, and bigger, and people being more critical of Steve as he became more well known, it's harder for people to see why Apple ever had fans, especially for the younger generation who were never around during the falling out, and have never used a DOS based computer never mind an Apple 2, or followed things from those days.
In reality the bottom line seems to be that both Bill and Steve were arrogant, eccentric geniuses within their field, who liked to screw anyone they could get a leg up on. Whether Steve was always that way (and shielded by Bill becoming a more obvious target), or became that way, is probably going to be a matter of debate for a lot of people for many years.
At any rate, I'm just explaining why the fandom exists (or trying to). I can understand how some people might think it's crazy as Scientology if they haven't grown up with this stuff. Being 36, I pretty much came up with the first personal computers, and was able to follow some of the stuff going on as a kid while it was happening.
