When you ’re a company as with child as Apple , the idea of threat begin to evolve . By contrast , when you ’re a brand - new inauguration or a little indie business , or even an established and somewhat successful company , you probably face threats from other companies , from your mathematical product just not being successful , or even from mistake you ’ve made .
But at the size Apple has reached , none of these are really existential threats . rival survive , certainly , but oftentimes they ’re more like equal — you’re as unconvincing to take them out as they are to take you out . Unsuccessful products might ding you a bit , but they ’re hardly going to sink you . And even big error ca n’t really do square legal injury when your receipts is in the tens of billions and your cash reserves are measured in twelve digits .
So when Apple has reached a peak — where , by some accounts , it isworth more than about 96 percent of the world — are those experiential terror , if there are any , come from ? As it turns out , when you ’ve reached the sizing of a rural area , those threats — perhaps unsurprisingly — often come from countries themselves . And those happen to be several of the biggest threat that Apple is face at this very moment .
Check yourself before you regulate yourself
For those who have been come Apple over the last several decades , it still sometimes seems surreal that it ’s give the rarified heights it has . Apple , a company that started out in a service department , a scrappy parvenu that take away on the corporate monoliths of the day , a clientele that almost went under more than once , only to dig itself out of the trap and succeed against on the face of it all betting odds .
But here we are in 2021 , and Apple is the most worthful ship’s company in the reality . Which is the kind of succeeder that gets a bullseye painted on your back .
antimonopoly regularisation has been loom around Apple and other Big Tech firms for a little while now , but last week it took another step forward with the initiation of a bill that would wedge Apple to permit alternate agency of buy apps on its program .
On the one hand , it ’s clear that Apple has at times used its control over the weapons platform — and we know how it loves control — to force terms upon developer that many find oneself less than amenable . In a Earth where there are relatively few competing platforms , abandoning one ( and the one that is reportedly the most profitable ) is n’t really an choice .
Sara Kurfeß / Unsplash
On the other handwriting , adding competing app stores on the political program does introduce additional danger to the chopine ’s security and condom : there are merely more vectors for scams and malicious software to seem , and if even Apple struggles with that on the App Store as it is , it ’s voiceless to guess that competitors , who will belike be capable to marshal few resources , will fare much better .
Much as Apple might have attempt to preemptively appease antimonopoly complaint with its App Store Small Business program and other small refinements to the scheme , escaping the bill of legislator and regulator simply is n’t feasible when you hit the size of it that Apple has now .
I fought the law and… nobody won?
Compound that same situation with the pervasive role of technology and digital substructure in our lives , and you also receive implication from law enforcement . Apple ’s late announcement to launch a program designed to scan for known image of child sexual insult stuff ( CSAM ) has been suffer with both praise and condemnation .
It ’s a complex issue thatmy confrere Jason Snell spent some time breaking down last week , but fundamentally it ’s one that has its roots in the issue of concealment in the digital age . When the role of a exclusive potbelly in the private information of trillion of users is as large as Apple ’s , it is inevitable that legal philosophy enforcement will come knock — as it has , many times over the years .
The ultimate impact of this technology has yet to be determined . If Apple manages to hold fast to its good intent , perhaps it will terminate up doing exactly what it ’s meant to , and no more . If our unsound fears come to pass , it may usher in a future where the government has its come-on late into our most personal gadget . The reality is probably somewhere in the middle , but that does n’t really assure anyone on either side .
But the world of technology is ever - changing ; no situation is static . One thing that ’s clear-cut is that the conflict over our privacy , our personal information , and the enforcement of police is still in its early inning .
Extreme perihelion aviation
In all of this , I think it ’s important to keep in psyche that Apple , as boastful as it is , present one other major threat that stems from an every bit large organization : Apple itself .
Pretty much all of the large technical school troupe run this jeopardy , when eating your own dog food morphs into drink your own Kool - assistance . Not only does this often progress into Icarus - esque situations where companies become confident they and they alone can puzzle out a societal woefulness through the practical app of engineering , but it also manifests in an overconfident feeling of being able to do no wrong .
That ’s only exacerbated by the public relations environment in which these corporations exist , where admitting a fault is equivalent to driving a car off a cliff . To take a comparatively benignant model , Apple never really said that its AirPower charging flatness did n’t work — it just disappeared any trace of it from its web site . If the company could go back and wipe that part out of the presentation it appeared in , it very well might .
AirPower is an example of a relatively little PR error made by Apple but burn out up in the technical school metier .
Apple
And that ’s grievous .
Because that form of hubris can harm Apple , but even more to the point , it make it more vulnerable to those other external forces . When Apple laud that the App Store is a citadel of safety and surety that everybody loves , it only exacerbates the response from those who finger wrong — which , in turn , can result to those with the power to make far - reach changes . When Apple call up it can take on a thorny issue like CSAM and make a unshakable organisation , it is potentially putting all of us at endangerment when it turns out that the system is n’t as foolproof as it thought , leaving the door unfastened for others to co - opt that it for their own , less baronial role .
Apple ’s spent year polishing its veneer to an anodized aluminum shine , and that ’s dish out it well in convincing customer to bank it , but that diamond - furrow bound has two sides , and the other is inculcating a good sense of infallibility . Pride goeth before a drop , they say , and the bigger the superbia , the harder the fall .
