00:00Well, let's talk now to Conor McKeon, who's a lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Stirling.
00:06Sorry, I pronounced your name appalling there. I'll get it right next time.
00:10Good to see you on the programme.
00:11So we're celebrating 50 years for Apple, or where it is.
00:14How do you think it's kept going for so long?
00:18So I think Apple's success can really be broken down into two key areas.
00:25So the first thing that they have managed, more than anybody else in the whole world, is design.
00:31They understand design, and Jobs understood design in a way that I don't think other people quite appreciated until now.
00:41Designs inspired by people like Dieter Rams really drove the desirability of their products in the public imagination.
00:49But that wasn't the whole story, because once you get used to using an iPhone, once you get used to
00:55using an iPad,
00:56it's very difficult to exit that walled garden and start using other things.
01:01It feels almost like a step down.
01:04And I think that that's what they really managed to lock people into.
01:08But moving on from the Jobs era, from that inspired genius design-led era into the Cook era,
01:15we've seen something a lot more complicated take shape, and that is mastery of the supply chain.
01:22And that's a lot less sexy to talk about, but it is a fact that Apple have managed to take
01:31control of a lot of the world's supply chain
01:33and make it so that dealing with them has got certain contingencies and certain capitals around it
01:42that are quite complicated and that people have only recently been starting to fully appreciate
01:48and then even take steps to combat against.
01:51If you look at some of the recent things that have happened in the UK, such as Kent v. Apple,
01:57the legal case in which Apple's app store dealings were actually taken to court
02:03by the King's College London lecturer Rachel Kent successfully,
02:08then you can see exactly how Apple have managed to, again, lock consumers into their products
02:16and make it so that moving away is very, very difficult.
02:19So they got us all hooked on the looks and then they made sure that we stayed.
02:24Genius stuff.
02:25Let's talk about that supply chain, though, because China, where Apple builds a lot of their products
02:31and a big market for their products, of course, do you think Apple could be where it is today without
02:35China?
02:37Absolutely not.
02:38And I think that that's the really exciting story of what's happening with Apple's future.
02:44And when we talk about China, it's going to get really complicated here,
02:49and I'll be careful exactly how I phrase this, but one of Apple's symbiotic partners is TSMC.
02:54And if people know what that company is, they know what that company is.
02:58So the history and the future of TSMC is really going to determine what Apple's future is in the market.
03:05But it is quite volatile, and we've seen Apple taking steps away from its reliance
03:11on what could be a vulnerable partner in TSMC at the moment by trying to manufacture their own chips in
03:20the United States,
03:20although obviously that's much more expensive, manufacturing their own chips outside of the United States as well,
03:27looking at new fabrication plants.
03:30moving towards producing their own silicon was a huge, huge deal,
03:34and it shows the company trying to create a lot more leverage for themselves.
03:38That's almost more interesting when we consider who has taken over Apple
03:43as the most valuable company in the world based on normal estimates, which is NVIDIA,
03:48who are also doing huge amounts of business in China.
03:52But again, it's about that supply chain.
03:54It's about those global international connections that these companies are desperately reliant on.
04:00Connor, it's great to talk to you.
04:01Thank you so much for coming back on the program.
04:02Connor McKeon from the University of Stirling.
04:04Thank you so much for coming back on the program.
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