“Challenging underdog” isn’t a term I’d have applied to Apple since the early days of the iPhone. They’ve been very big and very “big business” for a long time now, and I’ve called myself an Apple fan since the 1990s. They are a very different company today (mostly due to means; they’ve always had the ambition).
Exactly my point, in the days of the first colourful iMac G3, ads with Jeff Goldblum in it, and the massively popular iPod, Apple was known as the challenging underdog. Even when they first launched the iPhone they were thought of as challenging the existing mobile device space dominated by Windows Mobile and CE, and PalmOS. They were exciting, moving fast, and disrupting markets.
That early built up reputation has got them far, and I would say has continued on for about another decade or so after the iPhone launch. Since that, their coninued lawsuits and anti competitive practices have been more and more prevalent in mainstream media, and that previous reputation is now begining to tarnish amonst normal consumers. When the standard user sees them as big business and not the challenging underdog anymore, it paves the way for a new cooler small tech company to come and steal their bacon.
Yeah, couldn’t really call them the underdog post-iPhone. But they were a top-dog for a while after that.
The decline takes a long time to set in though. MS had lost the plot by 2012 (the release of Windows 8), but they’ve been shambling on for more than a decade since then.
