Apple’s trillion-dollar world

Bloomberg:

Now the business founded by Steve Jobs and his pal Steve Wozniak in a Los Altos garage in 1976 truly stands alone. Apple Inc.’s market capitalization was a paltry $3 billion when Jobs returned to the wounded company in 1996, after it had acquired his startup, NeXT. Passing the $1 trillion mark a little more than two decades later puts an exclamation point at the end of a remarkable run of success—one that started with Jobs’s introduction of the iMac, iPod, iPad, and, especially, the iPhone, and was extended by his successor, Tim Cook, who now presides over the most valuable business in modern history.

And:

Jobs took the stage in January 2007, during a now legendary appearance at MacWorld in San Francisco, and said in his usual pugilistic style that smartphones “are not so smart, and they’re not so easy to use.” The iPhone, he told us, “works like magic.”

Terrific read, though one with its share of snark, like so:

Thus was Apple’s winning formula refined: slick, simple products with hefty price tags, accompanied by splashy press events, mesmerizing advertising, and the numbing repetition of words like “amazing” and “phenomenal.”

And:

While the iPhone has altered daily life so much that no one remembers life before it, Apple has also persuaded customers to embrace other inventions they never knew they wanted, such as connected watches that buzz and beep (to cure the distraction of the phone, Apple says) and wireless dongles that hang ridiculously from their ears.

Still, an interesting essay, lots of images of people staring at their phones.