You can’t argue with Steve Jobs. I don’t mean the Apple supremo is always right, because I’ve been around long enough to remember his mistakes. Jobs is the closest the IT industry has to a magician – he makes fewer mistakes than his enemies would like, but he’s human. I remember the Apple III and the Lisa and the NeXT Cube, and they were flops.

That said, I have the highest opinion of him as an operator. Not many people could announce a new mobile phone in San Francisco during the week of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas and get more press coverage about this one device than the whole CES got. And to put the cream on the coffee, when I tuned into a BBC report on the CES, it switched from Vegas to San Francisco in the middle. Reporters who had travelled to Vegas were covering the iPhone launch instead of stuff at CES.

But when I say you can’t argue with Steve Jobs, what I really mean is that you dare not.

One commentator predicted that the iPhone would be a commercial flop. His arguments were simple and to the point: the success of a very expensive device like the iPhone depends on mobile carriers. If the carriers take it, and subsidise the price, it becomes affordable.

At $600 with a big subsidy, the iPhone is not just any ordinary phone (except, it is, because it doesn’t do 3G) but an expensive phone. So my brave colleague had a point, but he was roundly attacked by huge numbers of angry zealots anyway.

They accused him not just of being wrong (we pundits can live with that!) but of being a “shill” – someone paid to bring the Apple share price down temporarily so that investors can buy cheaply. They asked him if he thought he was “helping humanity” and used a range of colourful expressions to imply he was “anti-Apple”.

And then the truly insane comments and insults started to fly around the room.

Take it from me: you can’t argue with Steve Jobs.