Apple's iOS update will be bad news for developers, but a boon for users | John Naughton

The tech giant's monopoly over App Store content will bring a change to data privacy on its devices that has advertisers worried

If in August 2018 you had invested 5,000 in Apple stock, you'd have doubled your money in two years. Nifty, eh? But if you'd bought a single share at the company's IPO price of $22 in 1980, it would be worth nearly $28,000 (21,000) today. This is the kind of hindsight that is bad for one's blood pressure: it merely confirms Warren Buffett's famous observation, quoting his mentor Ben Graham, that in the short run the stock market may be a betting machine, but in the long run it's a weighing machine.

Either way, Apple's market capitalisation now weighs in at $2.2tn. What was once a plucky little outfit battling against the mighty Microsoft has somehow morphed into a corporate behemoth. And the interesting thing is that, until recently, nobody outside of stock exchanges seemed to have noticed the implications of this metamorphosis. When the House judiciary antitrust subcommittee summoned four tech bosses to a critical hearing in Congress, for example, Apple's Tim Cook got off lightest. Subcommittee members reserved most of their ire for Amazon, Facebook and Google.