When I walked up to the Burlingame, California, Apple Store at 6:00pm on Friday--the fabled D hour for sales of the new iPhone--there was a crowd of about 100 mostly young people and three TV crews. Then they started chanting the seconds to the opening: 10, 9... I thought: an enthusiastic bunch, but perhaps a disappointing number.
Then I noticed the line snaking around the corner. When I turned it to see how long, I was astounded. I couldn't see the end. After walking its length, I'd estimate it was an additional 1,000 people--chatting, laughing, cheering.
Later I noticed that many of them were buying two iPhones (the maximum number). By 8:00pm, the store was sold out (though with more due tomorrow and every day).
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reinvented the cell phone as a mini-computer and iPod, to the great benefit of his customers, his employees, his stockholders, and society at large. Analysts expect 100 million of them to be sold over the next 10 years. What value created. How many lives touched and improved. It's another triumph, I thought, for entrepreneurship and the market economy.
Then I remembered a protectionist conservative once chiding me on the "disloyalty" of international firms as versus what he said was their duty to the central state. We have to choose, he said.
Let's see. One improves our lives through risk-taking, creativity, and productivity, and does so though contract and consent. The other rips us off, spies on us, jails us, and kills people on a grand scale.
The protecto-con was right. We have to choose.
My Apple, 'tis of thee...
