Abstract

The iPhone—the flagship product of the world’s largest media company—is at the core of the global electronics hardware and content distribution industries. With its minimalist design, Apple’s iconic device has been a benchmark for innovation since the first version came onto the market in 2007. The iPhone is famous for other reasons: its success is attributed to its place within a proprietary media “ecosystem” controlled and managed by Apple. This stretches from the music and movies people purchase through iTunes to the closely regulated App Store, where third party software is licensed, taxed, and retailed. The result is a famously easy-to-use end-to-end model for digital consumption. What was once a fragmented array of diverse sources and services has become a unified and contained model, bounded by Apple’s strict licensing, app approval, and digital rights management policies.