Apple goes from digital underdog to tech bully (News Feature)

By Andy Goldberg May 4, 2010, 3:50 GMT

San Francisco - 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 US after Microsoft and oil giant Exxon and will probably soon overtake Microsoft. This year alone Apple will ring up 60 billion dollars 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 its iPhone operating system must be compiled using proprietary Apple tools.

That insistence sparked a storm of online protests.

'These restrictions are so over the line,' was one typical post at BetaNews, a popular developers' forum. 'Everybody go to/develop for Android!' it urged on behalf of the Google operating system that is Apple's main mobile rival.

Apple maintains a similar iron grip over its iPhone and iPad - banning apps with sexual innuendo and even ones that bash public figures, even in jest. One app that ran afoul of Apple's censorship was only allowed in after it won a Pulitzer Prize. A game in which you can place politicians on a trampoline in the White House remains on the forbidden list.

Apple is notoriously secretive about its upcoming products and is taking unprecedented flack for its behaviour in the now infamous case of the missing iPhone prototype.

One of its eagerly awaited, unreleased new-generation devices was left in a bar by a company engineer last month, only to be found and picked up by a student. Tech site Gizmodo paid 5,000 dollars for the device, which it promptly returned to Apple after examining it from every angle.

The story could have ended there with no great harm done to anyone. But Apple claimed that the device had been stolen, and police immediately raided and searched the home of the Gizmodo editor who wrote the story and seized his computers.

Even Comedy Central's news satire The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which appeals to the same audience of tech-savvy adults in their 20s and 30s who are prime Apple customers, felt it necessary to zing the company.

'Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one,' said Stewart. 'But now Apple is busting down doors in Palo Alto, while Bill Gates rids the world of mosquitoes.'