As Apple CEO Steve Jobs defines one hot consumer product segment after another, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Apple is assuming the dominant position in the world of consumer tech.

And with its rise, so rises the lightning rod of criticism.

It Wasn’t Always Like This

To give you an idea of how novel this is for Apple, let me juxtapose it with this: In 1997 Michael Dell said, when asked what he would do with Apple

I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

That’s not just some dude; that’s Dell of Dell Computers.

And that’s not the criticism I’m talking about in this article, that was an actual near-truth.

In those dark days the word “Apple” was rarely without the preceding adjective “beleaguered”. That’s how bad it was.

From those depths, Apple and Jobs have carefully and thoughtfully wielded the Consumer Tech Underdog mantle. They first sold millions of iMacs to people who wanted simplicity, nothing to do with floppies, nothing to do with Microsoft, or all three. Then they unleashed the marketshare-devouring, trend-setting, competition-crushing iPod, and followed that up in 2002 with a very advantageous relationship with the music industry.

That was in the infancy of online music sales, when the music industry didn’t realize that the iTunes Store would become the 900-pound gorilla of online media sales, and that the iTS’s at-the-time very innocuous 99¢ pricepoint would become the standard for downloaded music tracks across the Web.

But Now…

The criticism I’m talking about in this article is the type generated because Apple is doing well. Now I’m seeing stories like Is Apple The New Evil Empire? from Rolling Stone. Wow, quite a switch in fortune, wouldn’t you say?

The Apple iPhone isn’t out and won’t be for months, yet there are “iPhone killers” out already. Apple creates so much fear (or attention, however you see it) in consumer tech that there are competitors lining up to compete with a product that won’t be here for 16 weeks.

Is It Cold In Here?

And a new Cold War with Microsoft is springing up, fanned by the launch of Microsoft’s Vista operating system and a new round of hilarious, biting Mac ads. Which of course is good news for Apple fans, because it means Apple is once again a serious contender for parts of the pie Microsoft wants. Which means Apple’s putting out seriously good products these days.

Between the late 1980s and today, Apple was just a small but useful diversion for Microsoft in the OS Wars, useful because without Apple — and thus some form of actual, serious OS competition, however small — Microsoft would probably have gotten hit much harder in the great Microsoft antitrust lawsuit (settled 2002).

Ready for AIM?

The newfound Apple Influence Metric (new term, natch) follows Apple’s stock price:

That stock graph also mirrors Apple’s criticism profile, however (I’ll leave that acronym for someone else). It’s a growing profile that pundits, Microsoft lackeys and various mouth-breathing, malformed halfwits have been waiting more than a decade to take a swing at.

There’s plenty of room to grow, and Apple looks poised to test the ceiling at this rate. What’s the headroom? I’d say quite a bit, since the Mac OS is still only around 5% of the market vs. Windows’ 95%.

Pundits et. al., get your typewriters ready, there’s going to be a lot to swing at.