[...] Apple's profits, at root, are a product of its power to control.

Apple's ability to govern its employees, supply chains, and image allow it to restrict behavior and creativity in its interests - try getting a genius to say "crash," the company to pay tax, or your music out of your iPhone. Apple's ability to assert proprietary control over public goods, from the town square to government research, allow it to generate income far in excess of anything it could hope to wring from its staff. Apple's performance of friendliness and innovation allows it to soothe customers while convincing both them and investors that it is the source of a happier, richer destiny. Apple's profit does not come from packaging the labor of the past, in other words, but from the power to organize the present in a way that makes others believe that is inventing the future.