Change — rapid, visceral change — is one of the most exciting things about the technology industry; when hard work and incredible foresight combine in a product or service that changes the world in just a few years and makes a lot of people rich in the process. Maybe that’s why when we see a company responsible for such profound change start to mature, we get a little uneasy.
It has been a little over six years — an eternity in tech — since the late Steve Jobs stood onstage at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention center to announce that “today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Already in good shape thanks to the success of the iPod, the iPhone (and later iPad) turned Apple into something Silicon Valley and Wall Street had never really seen: a big, profitable consumer tech company growing at a surreal pace.