It is almost a cliché to say that our lives have been unalterably changed by the five “FAANG companies: Most know that FAANG is an acronym for the five most popular and best performing tech stocks in the market, namely Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet’s Google.
Of these five companies, it seems that Apple is the one that intrigues us the most. That is likely due to the company’s history and also to the charisma of Steve Jobs.
That’s why I was drawn into an article, “How Apple Thrived in a Season of Tech Scandals.” Here’s how Farhad Manjoo begins:
The business world has long been plagued by Apple catastrophists — investors, analysts, rival executives and journalists who look at the world’s most valuable company and proclaim it to be imminently doomed.
The critics’ worry for Apple is understandable, even if their repeated wrongness is a little hilarious. Apple’s two-decade ascent from a near-bankrupt has-been of the personal computer era into the first trillion-dollar corporation has defied every apparent rule in tech.
Companies that make high-priced hardware products aren’t supposed to be as popular, as profitable or as permanent. To a lot of people in tech, Apple’s success can seem like a fluke, and every new hurdle the company has faced — the rise of Android, the death of Steve Jobs, the saturation of the smartphone market, the ascendance of artificial intelligence and cloud software — has looked certain to do it in.
But this year, as it begins to roll out a new set of iPhones, the storyline surrounding Apple has improbably shifted. In an era of growing skepticism about the tech industry’s impact on society, Apple’s business model is turning out to be its most lasting advantage.
Because Apple makes money by selling phones rather than advertising, it has been able to hold itself up as a guardian against a variety of digital plagues: a defender of your privacy, an agitator against misinformation and propaganda, and even a plausible warrior against tech addiction, a problem enabled by the very irresistibility of its own devices.
Though it is already more profitable than any of its rivals, Apple appears likely to emerge even stronger from tech’s season of crisis. In the long run, its growing strength could profoundly alter the industry.
