The news at a glance
Apple: Closing in on $3 trillion
Apple approached a staggering milestone this week, said Ryan Vlastelica and Thyagaraju Adinarayan in Bloomberg.com: a $3 trillion market value. Just 16 months after becoming the first U.S. company to cross the $2 trillion mark, Apple has a market value “bigger than the entire U.K. economy.” It’s been a remarkable rise for the iPhone maker, whose shares “have returned a whopping 22,000 percent” since the end of the 1990s, when founder Steve Jobs returned to the company. “Now investors can’t get enough of the stock,” which they see as a “safe place to park their money.” Investors think that even if demand for iPhones flags, there will be other blockbusters in the pipeline.
Three trillion dollars still can’t buy Apple a break from the supply chain chaos, said Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li in Nikkei Asia (Tokyo). Even with an “industrywide priority on chips and components,” the company is “having a nightmare before Christmas.” Unprecedented bottlenecks in the supply chain have “forced Apple to scale back its production goal for 2021,” leaving many customers waiting this Christmas. The new iPhone 13 Pro Max contains more than 2,000 components, making it a prime example of “the globalized production model that has long powered modern manufacturing.” And it can’t stay ahead of the world’s supply woes forever.
What if Meta wants to grab your name?
There’s apparently only room for one metaverse, said Maddison Connaughton in The New York Times. In 2012, Thea-Mai Baumann started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, “a name she used in her creative work” as an artist interested in augmented reality. She had fewer than 1,000 followers and used the account mainly to “document her life in Brisbane.”
But on Nov. 2, five days after Instagram’s parent company Facebook announced it would become a “metaverse” company and changed its name to Meta, Baumann’s account was disabled. A message on the screen read: “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.” Meta’s “opaque policies” generally give it “unfettered discretion” over accounts. However, once