Apple forged its reputation at the dawn of personal computing as a fearlessly independent innovator with one of the most famous television ads of all time.
Called 1984 after the year it appeared and George Orwell’s classic novel of dystopia and dictatorship, the ad featured a hammer-wielding female athlete representing the new Apple Macintosh, who single-handedly destroys the dictatorship of computing conformity offered by Apple’s rivals like IBM and Microsoft.
But 26 years later, the pendulum has swung back — and then some.
Apple is now one of the richest, most powerful tech companies on the planet thanks to its world-beating mobile devices like the iPod, iPhone and newly introduced iPad.
All of a sudden, Apple is beginning to look a lot like the dominant companies it so famously derided back at the start of its journey.
It’s the third-most valuable company in the U.S. after Microsoft and oil giant Exxon and will probably soon overtake Microsoft. This year alone Apple will ring up $60 billion in sales.
But as Apple power grows, so do the company’s critics.
Recent tech news headlines reflect Apple’s changing image. The products may still be great, but a company once seen as the smart and scrawny underdog is increasingly portrayed as an overbearing monolith seeking to preserve and expand its dominance at all costs.
“Is Apple another Microsoft?” ComputerWorld asked, while even the mainstream New York Times chimed in with criticism, calling Apple “churlish”, and saying that the gorgeous iPad had become “a metaphor for the hermetic kingdom of Apple: a seamless device that can’t be opened, has no apertures for input and is animated mostly by purchases from Apple.”
The criticisms may also be shared in Washington, where the US Justice Department is reported to be considering an antitrust investigation over Apple’s announcement last month that all third- party programs written for…