The United States is a Lot Like Apple

Some commute thoughts from yesterday afternoon:

The United States is a lot like Apple. Once it had a really good product that everyone wanted. It was high quality, intelligent, well-thought out, and built well. Around the world everyone wanted to be like the United States. Like Apple, the US had a rough patch. (The US had the Civil War; Apple the John Scully years.) Both made their way through and came out the other side better than they were before. They both went on to become the beacons of excellence that everyone aspired to.

And then something happened. Suddenly both the United States and Apple decided they were the only ones who knew how things should be done and felt that because of their market share they could dictate the direction the rest of the world had to follow. It was hubris, pure and simple. We're The United States! We're Apple! If you don't like it, you don't have to follow but get the hell out of our way if you don't.

In a sane world, people would abandon these two entities completely, but billions were still addicted to the idea of both Apple and the United States—if not their current state—so with a only a few exceptions, the world still followed along—in some cases making the same foolish mistakes the US and Apple did in their "product lines" did because the neither couldn't be wrong…right?

I'm not directly comparing Tim Cook and the Orange Shitstain in the White House, by any means but I can see the correlation between bad decisions and the unrest we're seeing internationally. When Apple stopped including built-in floppy drives, it was fine. We knew it was outdated technology and needed to go. But then it arbitrarily got rid of industry-standard ports, forcing us into dongle hell. It stripped out the beloved Magsafe connector, and started soldering SSD and RAM onto the motherboards.

And then along came the butterfly keyboard.

While I can't draw specific parallels between any of these Apple blunders with things the United States has done over the last 70 or so years, you get where I'm heading with this. The good ol' "too big to fail" scenario.

Faced with the reality of what was happening to their reputation (not to mention their bottom line), Apple finally opened its eyes to what was happening and has made efforts to correct course. The question is, will the United States have its own 16-inch MacBook Pro/Mac Pro mea culpa moment or will it continue to stubbornly produce its own butterfly keyboard until it goes out of business or is crushed by a competitor?