there's a whole cohort of people who are entranced by the iphone but have never seen steve jobs. To be fair, he doesn't appear anywhere in the stores or in most advertisements.

I realize it's hard to believe, but you can be a fan of the product without being aware of the key members of the company that produced the product.

I'd say it's conceivable. Isn't there a statistic out there that says something to the effect of a large portion of the population can't name the current president of the United States?

I think that was the vice-president. What is shocking is that in another survey, some 40% of Americans asked didn't know who or what the Taliban were.

Most people who love the Mac or some other Apple product are fans of the _product_, many of them have never even heard of Steve Jobs, and most of them don't know what he looks like.

I know that doesn't jive with the popular misconception that everybody who loves an Apple product idolizes Steve Jobs, but, really, it's all about the product.

Celebrities often look very different in person than your mental image of them.

I can totally believe it, we went with the family once to visit/snoop around the Google campus, but if Eric Schmidt or Larry Page had showed up, I don't think I would have recognized them. (And we use Google products every day.)