Business | Upsetting the cart

What could bring Apple down?

Trustbusters, platform shifts and geopolitics could all hurt the iPhone-maker

Illustration showing half of Tim Cook’s head, with an apple on top
Illustration: Mike Haddad
|CUPERTINO

Tim Cook, boss of Apple, is having a rough start to 2024. In the past month his company has faced an unusual barrage of unpleasantness. A patent dispute forced it to remove features from two of its smartwatches. It found out that America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) would be suing it over antitrust transgressions. And it reported that it was losing market share in China, its second-biggest smartphone market. Adding insult to injury, a few Wall Street analysts said something unthinkable until recently—that Apple’s shares were overvalued. On January 11th Microsoft, a rival tech titan, duly dethroned the iPhone-maker, temporarily, as the world’s most valuable company.

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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Upsetting the Apple cart”

From the January 27th 2024 edition

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