Apple: Best [— ] of the Decade
] of the Decade — Steve Jobs and Apple appeared in an extraordinary number of 2009's “Best of” lists — Our favorite: “There's an app for that,” the Yale Book of Quotations' No. 3 quote of the 2009, right before Rep. Joe Wilson's “You lie” and after Captain Sully Sullenberger's …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple ends the 2000s as the rare company appearing on both the business and the culture pages: Steve Jobs shows up across an extraordinary number of 2009 "Best of" lists even while working largely out of public view, a run already documented in CNET's report that Apple thrived despite Jobs being away. Decade-scale retrospectives such as O'Reilly Radar's best and worst tech of the decade roundup treat the iPhone era as a defining arc of the ten years just closed.
First-order effects
- App Store developers head into 2010 with Flurry-confirmed record-breaking Christmas-season demand behind them, cementing the store as the default distribution channel for mobile software.
- The accolade wave lands weeks ahead of Apple's confirmed January 26 U.S. release window for the iSlate tablet — still officially unannounced, with only patent filings like the rumored tactile-feedback multi-touch surface hinting at its form — so the launch arrives against a backdrop of maximum cultural visibility.
Second-order effects
- Rivals building competing mobile platforms now face an Apple whose brand pull and developer mindshare sit at a decade high, forcing them to compete on ecosystem breadth rather than hardware alone.
- Year-end consensus raises the performance bar for Apple itself: after a sweep of "Best of" lists and a top-three Quote of the Year slot in the Yale Book of Quotations, every coming product is benchmarked against "decade-defining," amplifying both anticipation and scrutiny around the tablet.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the decade's structural result is an Apple transformed from a computer maker into a platform-plus-brand whose reach spans app distribution, media coverage, and mainstream language — a position competitors can only contest by assembling full ecosystems of their own.
- That concentration of gatekeeping power over which apps reach users points toward growing friction with developers and regulators over App Store control, a fault line already visible in the year's app-rejection controversies.
The trend: End-of-decade honors mark Apple's consolidation from hardware vendor into a consumer-culture platform company, with its next hardware act positioned to test how far that dominance stretches beyond the phone.