In the aftermath of the death of Steve Jobs, there have been loads of speculative pieces about the future of Apple Inc. The pressure is on for Apple to demonstrate that the company was not the one man band some believed it to be because of the genius of the co-founder, and how he restored a dying company to prominence.

The theory goes that Steve Jobs micromanaged every facet of the company’s operations, and, without him at the helm, everything will eventually begin to fall apart. This law of entropy has certainly impacted other companies after their charismatic and visionary founders have departed. You can cite chapter and verse as to how such corporations as the Walt Disney Company and HP fared, particularly the latter which, in recent years, has struggled to find its way.

Certainly there’s reason to be concerned. When Jobs was ousted from Apple in a brush up with the board of directors and CEO John Scully in 1985, Apple spent over a decade suffering a gradual, seemingly inevitable decline. When Jobs returned first as an advisor in 1996, after Apple bought NeXT, it was very possible there would be no more Macs in the near future. Apple was hemorrhaging cash, suffering from too many products that didn’t earn their keep. There were many credible reports indicating that Apple was probably dead, and there was that infamous remark from Michael Dell, founder of Dell, who suggested Apple ought to be shut down and its assets returned to the shareholders.

Over the next 15 years, Apple managed to amaze both critics and customers by doing the unexpected. Time after time, new products seemed irrelevant or underwhelming, only to be embraced by customers who had different ideas. Today, the iPod is a great success story, but few believed that the very first version, released in 2001 and costing $399 for a gadget with 5GB of storage, would catch on and take over the market. Indeed, Tony Fadell, credited as the iPod’s inventor, got a pass wherever he went when he tried to interest tech companies in his concept. Jobs understood the potential, took a chance, and the rest is history.

In the wake of denigrating the quality of existing mobile phones, Apple announced the iPhone. We only learned later that it was evidently a fork in the project to develop the iPad. But again, the critics were skeptical that the thing would catch on. After all, people who wanted smartphones bought a BlackBerry in those days. The mobile handset market was saturated, so how could Apple possibly succeed?

The story of the iPad was similar. Critics weren’t impressed. It’s just a bloated iPod touch. Microsoft had spent years trying to convince you to buy tablet-based PCs without success. Why should you take Apple seriously where others had failed with similar products?

Of course, the public disagreed. The iPod, iPhone and the iPad all caught on quite quickly, exceeding analyst expectations about sales in nearly every case. Well, these days, analysts seem to have a better grasp of Apple’s potential.

Now if Steve Jobs were here and healthy, and if he introduced the iPhone 4s last week, I expect the critics would call it another home run, even though it looked the same as the previous model. After all, that approach to product refreshes is standard operating procedure at Apple, where they leap generations before revising the looks.

But the pressure was on Tim Cook to demonstrate that he was the proper replacement for Jobs, and could exceed your expectations. Although his delivery at last week’s media event seemed efficient and well-rehearsed, Cook is regarded as too low-key to ever create something akin to the famous “reality distortion field” that Jobs can convey during his presentations. Cook is an operations person, not a public personality, not a sales guru. The bar was raised too high, and he had to fail, even though he actually did a pretty decent job. In retrospect, maybe it would be better for Cook to try to convey a less-formal demeanor, and maybe his personality would come through more effectively.

Don’t forget, though, that Cook hasn’t had years to master a public persona. Maybe he’ll never get the knack, maybe we’ll just get used to him. It doesn’t matter as much because, in recent years, the ailing Steve Jobs gave his lieutenants more and more screen time in those presentations. They had their chances to shine, and the media events remained slick affairs with great visuals, and compelling arguments.

Certainly, the public has reacted quite favorably to the iPhone 4s, with record numbers of pre-orders. But it will take a while for the critics to take Apple quite as seriously without Jobs at the helm. That is to be expected, and even though it’s reported that Jobs had already approved a number of product intros for the next few years, Apple is going to have to continue to prove it’s in good hands.

In the short term, little will change. But over time, even if the efforts of Steve Jobs to embed his vision and DNA into the corporation prove successful, things will change. That’s inevitable, but in the end, it may well be that they will be changes you can believe in.

You just know that Apple fans can complain, and loudly, if the company disappoints them. Certainly when the iPhone 5 with a new case and lots of new internal workings ended up as an iPhone 4s with the latter but not the former, the social networks were filled with heated protests. The media followed suit, pretending that this was strictly a minor update and that Apple should have done better.

But consider the situation: Apple builds a new iPhone with a much speedier processor and graphics capabilities, offering tremendous performance improvements. There’s a superior camera, with higher resolution image sensors, automatic stabilization when you take videos, improved picture quality, not to mention the Siri personal assistant. That’s a breakthrough in speech recognition software, folks. What’s more, the antenna is significantly revised to improve reception. In addition to the new features, Apple revises the case substantially, say with a slim brushed aluminum rear, mirroring the concept of the MacBook Air.

If that were to happen, the media would be raving about the huge changes in the latest and greatest iPhone. But stick with the current case, and the very same internal changes become insignificant. Can you see the disconnect?

Besides, it’s not unusual for Apple to keep the case the same, or substantially the same, through several product revisions. That was true with the iPhone 3 series and whole generations of Macs, so why should it change now? And how does it even make a difference, if the hardware and software is otherwise significantly improved?

I suppose Apple had to meet a higher standard last week, what with Tim Cook running the company without Steve Jobs watching his back. They had to demonstrate that the company was in good hands, and would continue to build the sort of products the public was prepared to embrace with passion.

Understand that the iPhone 4s is not mainly for owners of the iPhone 4, most of whom wouldn’t be able to upgrade without paying a substantial penalty to their wireless carriers. Instead, it’s meant for new customers, plus those who have older iPhones and are eligible to upgrade their hardware and pay the regular subsidized price. There are millions of those out there who have waited patiently for the next iPhone.

Apple’s strategy, tried and proven, has been shown to be correct once again. As the stock price soared Monday, Apple announced that over one million pre-orders for the iPhone 4s were received on the very first day. The initial stock has already been exhausted, and those of you who order one now will have to wait a week or two for delivery.

Now in the summer of 2010, Apple tallied 600,000 iPhone 4 sales the very first day, with a total of, as I recall, 1.7 million sold as of the first weekend on sale. What Apple will record as of next Sunday night is anyone’s guess, though sales of two million or more wouldn’t be out of the question. So much for a minor upgrade, and a disappointing product introduction.

Now none of this means that the iPhone 4s will garner universally positive reviews, or even close. I expect some reporters will assume that there are few changes, and color their evaluations appropriately. However, to be truly fair and balanced about the whole thing, they should actually test the claims of vast performance improvements with games, Web browsing, and general OS snappiness. The antenna system should be evaluated to see if a “death grip” produces any negative impact. Certainly the iPhone 4s ought to be tested in neighborhoods where a wireless carrier has marginal service, just to see if the quality of the connection is improved, and the number of dropped calls reduced.

In other tests, still pictures and movies should be examined carefully against those produced by the iPhone 4 and competing handsets. Also, Siri’s accuracy in the real world should be throughly evaluated, with the realization that it’s still regarded as a beta and may not always perform efficiently or accurately.

Of course, this is all simply common sense. You expect that product testers will give the iPhone 4s a thorough going over and, shorn of Apple’s claims, attempt to determine just how much of an improvement it really is. Apple’s decision to stick with a 3.5-inch display, against Android OS handsets of four inches or more, ought to be given some real-world consideration. Does a larger screen make sense on a smartphone? How does a larger unit impact portability? Would it fit into your pocket or purse as comfortably, or fall neatly to hand?

One of Apple’s historical advantages against the competition is elegance. An Apple gadget generally runs smoothly, looks great, and isn’t too difficult to master. There have been exceptions, of course, and even today’s Mac has its share of usability traps. But so long as Apple continues to concentrate on the features that work, rather than the ones that look good in a PowerPoint presentation, they should do well.

Yes, Apple’s rivals will complain that the iPhone 4s isn’t a significant upgrade, and that they can beat Apple on sheer specs. But it doesn’t seem as if those complaints will really hurt Apple’s sales.

Over 14 years, Steve Jobs had the opportunity to remake Apple’s history. His youthful exuberance, and many say his excesses, resulted in his forced departure from Apple in 1985. I doubt anyone at the time would have predicted how the company would fare in the years to come, or that Jobs would return to find Apple on the ropes.

The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple and took over, first as interim CEO, or iCEO, had become a seasoned executive with a vision. He stripped the company of non-performing or underperforming products, focusing strictly on reclaiming the Mac’s glory. The iMac was the first proof that things weren’t going to be the same.

Beginning with the arrival of the iPod in 2001, Jobs remade Apple as a consumer electronics company that, with the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad, resulted in incredible sales and profits. Apple is clearly the envy of every tech company on the planet.

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When I first discovered Macs in the 1980s, I never heard of Steve Jobs, or Steve Wozniak for that matter, nor was I particularly familiar with the Apple culture. I only knew that the Apple Macintosh was the future for my line of work, traditional typography. At the time, I labored on one of those mini computers that came with a simple black and white terminal and keyboard. You entered text commands, and, you hoped, the end result would look presentable.

Some of those machines even offered a rudimentary WYSIWYG display, giving you an approximation of the look of the letterforms and formatting on the output that would soon emerge from a processing machine. Yes, we had to sometimes pour chemicals into that smelly developing device, which used substances similar to what you employed in traditional photography.

Once I migrated to the Mac, I knew I was approaching the end to my line of work, thus hastening my return to writing and, eventually, to broadcasting. To me, the Mac and other Apple products represented something with which you had a deep personal connection. It put the “personal” in a personal computer, and that’s something that Microsoft and other companies have yet to understand. They can imitate the form of the device, if they choose, but the substance has always even lacking.

Now it’s a sure thing that Jobs wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. I could see that in my brief encounters with him, and certainly there are enough credible anecdotes around about his often abusive behavior of employees to demonstrate that he was a rough and unpredictable taskmaster. I wouldn’t presume to understand the whys and wherefores of his emotional outbursts, but it’s very likely that his personal demons also made him the most talented CEO on the planet.

Certainly in his second coming at Apple, it was clear he learned a thing or two about business. The original Macintosh designed and built during Jobs’ first tenure at Apple was highly flawed, although it revealed signs of genius. From folks who used the NeXT computers, I understand that they, too, had their design oddities. After Jobs returned to Apple, he introduced the Power Mac G4 Cube, visually a modern testament to the NeXT Cube, but also a highly flawed design. The Cube had a complex plastic housing that might at times develop cracks in the corners, and the proximity power/sleep switch could accidentally be activated if you moved your fingers too close, perhaps when cleaning the unit. I know when I reviewed one, my wife forced it into sleep mode several times during her routine housecleaning.

But it was clear Jobs had a soft spot for the Cube. I recall when I attended Apple’s official rollout of Mac OS X in March of 2001, at Apple’s headquarters. I was seated behind Steve Jobs and Philip Schiller, in fact, during parts of the presentation where Jobs wasn’t involved. During the question and answer session, Jobs was asked if Apple planned to discontinue the Cube due to poor sales. His response, “you don’t know what you’re talking about!” But the questioner had it right on, because the Cube was discontinued only weeks later. It seemed clear to me that Jobs made the decision reluctantly, but he was a savvy enough businessman to know the numbers didn’t add up.

In the end, though, his successes outweigh the failures. The iPod, iPhone and the iPad reinvented the company, which is why “Computer” was removed from the corporate name. Even though Jobs took three sick leaves because of his extended illness, it was clear that Apple could continue without missing a beat. Tim Cook’s low-key demeanor may not compare to the amazing charisma that made Jobs the consummate salesperson. But Cook clearly has inherited the company’s DNA, and few outside of Apple are, I’m sure, fully aware of the extent to which Apple’s employees pooled their efforts to enhance Jobs’ reputation as a visionary, a true genius. None of that could have happened without the people to back him up.

My feeling is that Jobs worked hard in his final years to make sure the company he co-founded could survive without his micromanagement. Since it takes several years for a new product to often reach the production lines, it’s very likely that other Apple gadgets with as much promise as the iPhone and iPad are already in the pipelines. Perhaps we’ll see them in the next year or two, a testament to the greatness of Steve Jobs.

At the same time, the critics state, no doubt accurately, that Apple has to be nimble enough to switch gears as market forces change. Simply following blindly in Jobs’ footsteps may work for a while, but it’s not a long-term solution. The company will, some day, have to seek its own way to live long and prosper.

Meantime, the world without Steve Jobs will be a colder place.