iPhone, became the conduit for his worship, elevated above other
material items or technologies.
We thus have, in essence, fetishized the iPhone, and in the process
opened the door to a new kind of corporate extremism to emerge.
While this extremism doesn’t put us in actual physical danger (I don’t
believe employees of Apple are violent radicals), this kind of secular
worship is dangerous. Why? Because when we allow an enterprise to
run unchecked and lawless, we’ve lost respect for the proper standards
they, versus other firms, get to play by. The resulting two-tiered
system creates a winner-take-all environment that adds further fuel to
the flames of inequality. Simply put, Apple in the Steve Jobs era got
away with behavior—not least Jobs’s own actions regarding backdated
stock options awarded to him by Apple^8 —that no other U.S. company
CEO would have gotten away with. At some point, the American
people, and the U.S. government, decided that Jobs and Apple were no
longer constrained by law. Things remained that way until Mr. Jobs’s
death.
Was it worth it? You decide. In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, following Jobs’s return to Apple, the company embarked on
the greatest run of innovation in business history. In those ten years,
Apple introduced one earth-shaking, 100-billion-dollar, category-
creating new product or service after another. The iPod, iTunes/Apple
Store, iPhone, and iPad... there has never been anything like it.
During those years, the consumer electronics industry was a
chocolate factory, and Steve Jobs its Willie Wonka. Every winter at the
annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs would stand on stage
and announce one new product upgrade after another—then start to
exit the stage, stop, turn, and say, “Oh, and one more thing.. .” and
change the world. Suddenly, what had been a comparatively minor
customer convention became an agora. The world’s stock markets held
their collective breaths. News reporters gathered outside Moscone
Center at dawn, previewing the next few hours. And Apple’s
competitors sat watching newsfeeds, hearts in throats, in terror of
what would hit them next.
It’s easy to forget now just how stunning Apple’s decade was. The
iPod’s introduction, in late 2001 after the twin shocks of the bursting
of the dot-com bubble and 9/11, played the same role as the Beatles’