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At 40, There's Never Been a Tech Company Quite Like Apple (qz.com)
Mike Murphy, reporting for Quartz: Forty years ago today, two college dropouts decided to start selling cobbled-together computers out of a garage in California because they couldn't afford the ones on the market. They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units. But in the years between then and now, Apple has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, spurring revolutions in how we communicate, use computers, listen to music, and to a lesser extent, tell the time. [...] Some critics think that Apple is boring now, setting itself up to iterate on its successes and lock customers into their services with products that are very good, but nothing they haven't really seen before. This is a solid business strategy that will provide strong returns for years to come, but not those eye-popping leaps we've seen before. Here's a video Apple published recently showcasing 40 of its most remarkable products.
Let's not forget, either, that Apple's most visible growth period -- after Jobs' return, the introduction of the iMac, later the iPhone -- was also a period in which Apple was saving production costs by using suppliers that employed child labor. That article is from 2013; there are still investigations -- and potential charges -- going on now.
Just keep that in mind when you fawn over Stev Jobs as some rogue market-disrupting genius: he made his billions with the help of child labor, indentured labor, conflict minerals, and relentless wage pressure on the workers who made his products. And we, upstanding people that we are, we ratified all of it, and celebrated him for doing it, by buying all his shit and then singing his praises in glossy magazine profiles.