For better or worse, Apple has completely reshaped the world we live in

Why is Apple Inc the world’s first $3 trillion company? It is an astounding achievement and one that has utterly changed the world.

Imagine how different our lives would be if there was no such thing as a smartphone. However, it is also a complex story to unpack because this is not just about Apple, though that is the starting point. It is about America and it is about the country’s relationship with the world.

The genius of Steve Jobs was that he had an intuitive feeling for what people wanted before they knew it themselves – and the ability to create the products and services to fulfil those desires. It is still worth watching the moment when he launched the iPhone at Macworld 2007.

What has happened since then is astounding, for even he could not envisage all the ways in which smartphones would be used. The first iPhones did not have a front-facing camera, so it could not take a selfie.

But the story is not just about him, or indeed about Tim Cook, who succeeded Steve Jobs as chief executive in 2011, or about Apple. It is about a group effort, in which a group of companies on the west coast of America have extended the influence of the US around the world – whether the rest of the world likes it or not.

Take some measures, starting with social media. The top five social media networks ranked by numbers of users are all American: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Four of those (the odd one out is YouTube, owned by Google) are all owned by Facebook. These are followed by a number of Chinese enterprises, which have been able to grow thanks in part at least to China’s ability to keep the US platforms out. There is not a single European or Japanese social network in the top 10.

Or take the transformation of the motor industry. The most valuable car company in the world is Tesla, a start-up. One person, Elon Musk, has not only changed the entire global industry, he has started the process that will lead to the end of the reign of the internal combustion engine.

Or take the crudest measure of economic power, the overall value of quoted companies in the world. Five of the top six, all worth more than $1 trillion, are American. They are: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the parent of Google), Saudi Aramco (the Saudi Arabian national oil company), Amazon and Tesla. Next, not yet quite a trillion-dollar company (it is worth “only” $950bn) comes Meta Platforms, the new name for Facebook.

Because we all use the products and services of high-tech America, we regard this as normal. If you are reading these words on an iPhone, or are directed to them by Facebook, the companies themselves are in the background. When we communicate with our friends and families via WhatsApp we focus on the conversation, not the technology that makes it possible.

But it is not normal at all. The US remains the world’s largest economy and it will be for another decade or so. But it has more influence on our daily lives, for better or worse, than ever before. Better in the sense that we have been able to cope with the stresses of the pandemic thanks to the competence of the US-developed communications systems – yes, Zoom is a US company, founded in California in 2011.

But maybe worse in the sense that the social media platforms seem to have encouraged people to interact only with people of similar views, and so have contributed to increased divisions in our societies. You could say that America’s “soft power”, the concept developed by Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist, has never been stronger, despite the current stresses in its society.

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Come back to the genius of Apple. We are all in the early stages of another industrial revolution, one that has been given a massive boost by the need to adapt to the pandemic. The pandemic will recede but many of the changes it has made to our lives will stick. Look at what the shift to online retailing has done to the business of Amazon, now worth more than $1.7 trillion.

If Apple can continue to understand human desires and hopes, as it has in the past with so many of its products, then it will not only deserve to be the world’s most valuable company – it will make the world, in a strange way, more American.