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Saw this great recap of an email conversation between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Gizmodo blogger Ryan Tate.

In a nutshell, Tate drunkenly rails against the Apple business model as taking freedom from consumers, stifling innovation through their tightly-controlled App Store, and generally making life difficult by not playing nice with Flash.  While the points are somewhat valid (though surprisingly juvenile for a alleged journalist), Jobs relates that the larger goal is to provide the best customer experience possible, and that if developers or consumers aren’t interested in that experience, there are plenty of other fish in the sea.

While this may seem like a rather arrogant sentiment, here’s the point: no one is forcing anyone to buy any Apple product any more than people are being forced into buying a Windows machine.  Apple does what it does because it wants to make a great product that people will enjoy using, and that will help them do the things they already do — but better.  And if it doesn’t, well then they’ll keep working on it.

Sounds pretty reasonable.  And also sounds like the business model of, I don’t know, every other company on Earth.

Yet at the end of the day, Jobs is up WAY past his bedtime fending off cocktail-infused tirades from someone who owns at least a MacBook Pro and an iPad.

Sheesh.