I’m going to wax a little philosophical for this week’s column, which also happens to be my last.
Stay Foolish debuted a decade ago, almost to the day, but I’ve been writing regularly for Macworld for nearly 20 years. When I first started out, we were all excited about what the latest in technology–Intel-powered Macs–would mean for Apple’s long-term prospects for survival. Two decades later, nobody ever even whispers that Apple is doomed anymore, because to suggest it would mark you as somebody divorced from reality.
It’s difficult to overstate just how different the Apple of today is from the Apple of 2015 or 2006. In taking a retrospective look at Apple, we most often find ourselves comparing the enormously successful behemoth that Apple now is to the company’s nadir in the mid-90s, when it was just steps from going out of business. But the truth is that even in just the last decade or two, the company has reached heights that seemed previously unattainable.
And somewhere along the way, I think the relationship of the company to its customers–and vice versa–changed as well. It’s something that I’ve found myself thinking about more and more in recent years. But is it me that’s changed, or is it Apple? I think probably a little of both.
As Apple started becoming more and more successful, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that one should ever really consider oneself a “fan” of a company.
Fan fare
Over the years, those in the Apple community have long been called everything from the liturgical “Apple faithful” to the insipid “iSheep”, dating back to the days when the prevailing wisdom was that to hitch your fortunes to this weird company must imply a cult-like devotion. The simple truth was that most customers were simply fans of the products themselves: they liked the way they worked and looked.
That hasn’t changed for me: I continue to be a fan of Apple’s products. But as Apple started becoming more and more successful, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that one should ever really consider oneself a “fan” of a company.
A fan is the kind of term we usually reserve for artistic or athletic pursuits. If I’m a fan of a sports team, I’m rooting for that team to win, and that is naturally aligned with the team’s own primary goals. But if I’m a fan of a company, am I rooting for it to notch another zero on its balance sheet? For no matter how much the company may pride itself on its products, its primary goal is surely to make more money.
Being a fan of Apple as a company means necessarily grappling with the reality of business itself. Apple is a moneymaking machine in a society built for and around moneymaking machines, and it is in some ways itself trapped in that system. Sometimes that means discontinuing product lines that don’t sell, and sometimes it means bending to the whims of authoritarian (or would-be authoritarian) regimes. Sometimes it even means paying a million dollars to insulate yourself from government policy, with the understanding that it’s just how business works.
Apple strives to be a virtuous company, but all companies have the end goal of making money.
Apple
Even when a company does verge into doing good works, whether it’s environmental sustainability or racial equity and justice, those moves must be couched as part and parcel of the company’s economic success. Because to not do so would open the company to accusations of it failing to fulfill the prime directive of any publicly-traded corporation: returning value to its shareholders.
Billions and billions served
Frankly, it’s difficult for a person to really comprehend Apple’s present-day value. To give just one example, Apple recently found itself on the receiving end of a fine from the European Union to the tune of $570 million. That sounds like a lot, to you or me, because it would be, to you or me. But in its most recent quarter, Apple generated that much revenue in a day–more than twice over, in fact. The European Commission could levy that fine several times over and barely make a dent in Apple’s bottom line. The Apple of 2025 is, in a very real sense, too big to fail.
Some view these fines as unfairly targeting Apple, arguing it’s an attempt to bring down a uniquely successful American company to elevate competitors from elsewhere in the world.
Reasonable people might differ on that thesis, but it is the unbridled enthusiasm for it that I find distasteful. Because, simply put, Apple does not need your help. It doesn’t need your defense or your enthusiasm. It certainly does not need your support, any more than your buying of its products–and even that it can do without, since you’re just one person.
Corporations, court decisions to the contrary, are not people. No person will live as long as Apple will, because it now has so much money that there is no practical way for it to run out. Tim Cook could go on a wild shopping spree and buy Luxembourg, and it would just be a bad quarter for the company.
None of this is intended to take away from the individuals at Apple, many of whom are devoted to doing good work. But those people are, by and large, not any more in control of the direction the company takes than the average citizen is of their country’s policies.
But if Apple really does believe in changing the world, as it so often claims, the opportunity is there. As one of the most powerful companies in the world (if not the most powerful), the power to buck the system is in its hands. It could decide, in the words of its most indelible slogan, to think different. Some might argue that the company’s immense size and value make it unwilling or unable to take chances, but those very same qualities arguably mean it’s maybe the only one that can.
See you, space cowboy
So that’s it. After more than 400 columns, I’m turning off the lights for Stay Foolish. It may not be the last time you see my byline over here, but if you want to keep up with my tech musings on the regular, you’ll still find me writing over at Six Colors and podcasting at Clockwise and The Rebound, and of course, you can always buy my books. Thanks for reading for all these years, and if I may be bold enough to leave with any advice–whether for you, or for Apple itself–it would be the very Steve Jobs adage from which I drew this column’s name: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
