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I’ve been writing about Apple for over twenty years, and at the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, I’m here to tell you that it’s not what it used to be. It used to be more fun.
No, don’t get up.
Here, have a raspberry candy. I have a whole bowl full of it. I don’t know why. I don’t even know where they came from. They showed up just after my most recent birthday. Already covered in dust. I should probably look into that.
Anyway, it’s true that I can easily say that it used to be more fun to beat Apple. I started ‘covering’ Apple by writing a fake Apple rumor site in 2001. Every day I let my imagination run wild, worked Apple into it and typed it up. Man, those were the days. (Before you get jealous, I made about $50 a month doing this, if I made anything at all.)
But talking about Apple used to be just talking about technology. Initially it was Macs. New, old, rumored to be coming, macOS features, apps (at the time they were called “applications”, if you can believe that) and peripherals. Technology was tangible. Then it was iPods. Apple released new ones every year, giving writers plenty to say. Sure, we talked about tricky things like DRM and there was even a little uproar Steve Jobs’ stock options. But even in the early days of the iPhone, things were mostly just… fun.
You know the history. Until Apple revolutionized the smartphone world with the iPhone, it was the little guy. Even when it made the best-selling digital music player, it was still somehow the little guy, always on the verge of being put out of business by its competitors. “Microsoft will ship the Zune and it will be a curtain call for Apple!” Apple’s demise was always just over the next hill.
With the launch of the iPhone and the App Store, that all changed. It turns out that the monkey’s paw we all wished for in the mid-1990s to keep Apple from going bankrupt had a downside. Who knew monkey paws could have a downside? Not me.
Apple’s astonishing growth from 2007 to today has put the company in an entirely different category of business. Depending on the day, it is literally the largest company in the world as measured by the value of its shares. No matter how many people the company employs, it’s simply too big to ignore. It has gone from a dwarf star to a black hole.
Jay Janner / Pool / ZUMA Wire / Shutterstock
On holiday?! Yes, we do. Now that’s part of the problem when we talk about Apple. The company has captured the attention of governments around the world, and Apple now feels compelled to fight back where it can and reluctantly play ball everywhere.
Have you heard of ‘too big to fail’? There is also too big to just tiptoe past. Apple has caught the attention of both Democrats, as Elizabeth Warren puts it the company must be split up and Republicans like Donald Trump, with whom Tim Cook personally feels the need to reconcile factory visits And Congratulationsotherwise the company be affected by tariffs. The company has run into further problems the National Labor Relations Council. And the EU and Apple have almost certainly enabled each other speed dial.
Seriously, I just want to talk about computers. Is that too much to ask?
Apple just isn’t the same small company we grew up with. And it doesn’t look like the company will shrink to a smaller size anytime soon. It turned out great and it swept us along, like a friend from high school who got rich but still invites you to parties with their new rich friends (who are all assholes). Of course, there are still and always will be products that the company ships and those products will promote the same rumors, launch events, reviews, and consumables that we’ve always enjoyed. But now there’s all this other stuff.
Of course, all that “other stuff” was always there, because technology is political (I hate to break it to you, but everything is like that one way or another). We could just ignore it because Apple was smaller. At least now that Apple is big enough to create its own gravitational field, people are no longer predicting that Apple will go bankrupt in the near future. There’s that.
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