Consumer hardware· 2014
In the book
An early conviction, called in 2014. Consumer hardware treated as a closed vertical system — the chip, the object, and the channel designed together so the stack could not be unbundled.
The first iPhone remains the proof. Not a phone with software on it — a vertical: custom silicon, a single object, a store that refused to be a reseller. We marked the name in 2014 because the pattern was already visible. The companies that matter design the whole machine.