Fifty years ago today, in a garage in Los Altos, California, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed a partnership agreement and set in motion a chain of events whose consequences no one could have imagined.
The story of Apple, the company they founded, reads like a business parable almost too dramatic to be credible. The visionary early success of the Macintosh, with its graphical interface and mouse ushering in the age of the personal computer. The boardroom coup that ejected Jobs in 1985. A decade of drift and near-bankruptcy. The prodigal return, the iPod, the iPhone, and then the transformation of a company that had been weeks from insolvency into the most valuable enterprise in the history of capitalism.
The technological achievement is genuinely extraordinary. The iPhone alone reshaped how billions of people navigate daily life, consume information and communicate. Whatever one thinks of the company’s methods, the scale and ingenuity of that achievement is impossible to deny.
But as Apple enters its second half-century, the questions its success prompts become ever more pressing. The business model it helped pioneer, in which a small number of platform owners extract rent from vast ecosystems while accumulating power that dwarfs most nation-states, deserves the sort of sustained democratic scrutiny that has been sadly lacking. Regulatory pressure has begun, belatedly, to address what boundaries should be set on that power.
READ MORE
There are other concerns. Research points to troubling correlations between heavy smartphone use and adolescent mental health problems, attention fragmentation and the erosion of cognitive capacities that were once taken for granted. Apple is not solely responsible for all these problems but it has profited from them.
The stakes are high, including in Ireland, where Apple’s global tax strategies have delivered huge windfall revenues to the State. What started in that garage in Los Altos gave the world something remarkable. But the question of who determines what comes next remains unanswered.
