What would Joseph Schumpeter have thought of Apple?

Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian-born political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship. Schumpeter, who died in 1950, was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized the term “creative destruction.” What would Joseph Schumpeter have thought of Apple?

The Economist:

What was once a scrappy startup with visionary co-founders keen to change the world has become the world’s largest corporation, worth $2.4trn, with 2bn devices in active use and a line of high-margin services to support them…
No doubt the young Schumpeter would have been fascinated by the late Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder. Jobs was uniquely gifted, or as Schumpeter would have put it, a “Caruso” (after a great Italian tenor of his time). Schumpeter drew up a checklist of ways to create new “combinations”, as he called entrepreneurial firms; Jobs used many of them. He created new goods (Macs, iPods, etc), a new method of production (the Cupertino-to-China supply chain) and new markets (the app economy). To start with, he also met huge resistance, as Schumpeter’s theory predicted he would.
Fast forward to today and Schumpeter would probably acknowledge Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor, as a top-notch manager, if not quite a Carusoesque entrepreneur. Some critics complain that under Mr Cook, Apple has not created a product as original as the iPhone. But, as Horace Dediu, an expert on Apple, points out, it relentlessly improves, refines and shrinks its components…
Apple may look invincible. But does it, too, feel the risk that the rug could be pulled from under its feet? … More serious is something that goes beyond creative destruction. It is Apple’s vast, and vitally important, supply chains in China, from which it will struggle to extricate itself as Sino-American relations deteriorate. Apple is playing it carefully; Mr Cook balances his firm’s exposure to China with grand investment promises in America. But Apple’s big Chinese presence is a danger nonetheless. Schumpeter, who spent the last years of his life musing, erratically, about the dark future of capitalism, would have sympathised.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s biggest risk is one of its own making, made specifically by Tim Cook, Chief Operating Officer turned Chief Executive Officer: The company’s potentially crippling over-dependence on CCP-controlled China.
See also: Tim Cook firmly latched Apple onto China’s CCP teat. What’s his plan for weaning it off? – November 2, 2022
It’s smart for both Apple and Foxconn to diversify assembly outside of China. There’s no sense having all of your eggs in one basket. — MacDailyNews, April 2, 2019
Apple cannot divest their dependence on China quickly enough (because they started years too late). – MacDailyNews. August 17, 2022
Diversify, diversify, diversify – especially away from CCP-controlled China. – MacDailyNews, October 19, 2022
Former U.S. President Richard Nixon, who opened relations with China in the early 1970’s, just before his death in 1994 remarked on China: We may have created a Frankenstein.
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