To understand how much the US’s new lawsuit strikes at the heart of the identity Apple has forged for itself, let’s first consider the firm’s fanbase.
Apple has a unique position as a tech brand, and is regarded with enormous affection by those who like it.
I’ve sat through a lot of Apple events in my time, both virtually and in person, and one thing that always makes us journalists raise an eyebrow is the whooping and cheering from the audience every time a new feature, no matter how small or incremental, is announced.
When a new hardware product goes on sale, Apple employees form a guard of honour outside stores and applaud its first buyers – some of whom will have camped outside for hours in advance, and spent thousands of dollars (who else could get away with charging $3,500/£3,499, for a VR headset?).
People get tattoos of Apple’s distinctive fruit logo. Windows, Google and ChatGPT symbols appear less popular.
“Apple is like a strange drug that you just can’t quite get enough of,” wrote Leander Kahney in his 2006 book The Cult of Mac.
It is this “strange drug” or “magical experience”, as Apple put it in a statement on Thursday, which is now under fire.
So far, Apple’s ethos is a wildly successful business model. As I write, the firm is worth $2.6 trillion.
Analysis firm CCS Insight estimates that 72% of smartphone handsets bought in North America alone in the last three months of 2023 were iPhones. Samsung took 25%, leaving just 3% for everybody else in the handset business.
bbc
