Apple + Google (Premium)

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported this morning that Apple is in "active negotiations" with Google to bring Gemini to the iPhone, a blockbuster development that will "shake up the AI industry." If you're an Apple fan, you may be cycling through the seven stages of grief right now. But even if you're not, you are almost certainly confused by this development. Aren't Apple and Google bitter rivals? Don't these companies hate each other?

I can explain this.

To do so, I need to tell you a story you've already heard, one that you think you know well. Actually, I will tell you two stories, stories that parallel each other in ways that are both obvious and unexpected. These are stories from our personal computing past, one distant and one less so. But they explain the disconnect between what we learned today and our collective understanding of these companies and their relationships.

Our collective confusion and disbelief at the day's news is tied to our incessant human desire to mythologize the key moments in personal technology history, and this leaves little room for nuance. We all know, for example, that Steve Jobs deftly introduced the world to the first iPhone in 2007, a moment that changed the world, ushering out the PC era and replacing it with the modern smartphone era. And that the iPhone was "three revolutionary products … a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device."

But few remember—or want to remember—that Apple needed a lot of help to bring the iPhone to market. Indeed, Jobs specifically played the song "A Little Help From My Friends" during the presentation not just to goad The Beatles into bringing their catalog to iTunes, but, I think, in reference to the many partners that Apple was relying on to make that launch a success.

This was true of the original Macintosh as well. And the parallels between the launches of these two industry-defining products, the Mac and the iPhone, are perhaps more profound than you know or remember. In both cases, there was an important partner, a betrayal, a lawsuit, public bitterness in both directions, and then an uncomfortable but inevitable reunion. And in both cases, it was Apple that compromised its ideals and thus its public image in acknowledging that it was better off allying with an enemy it had publicly disavowed and sworn to destroy.

I know this sounds overly dramatic. But it's true in both cases.

With the Mac, Apple courted third-party application developers so that it could launch the device with a reasonable collection of software that showed off the power and simplicity of its unique graphics user interface (GUI). But it had few takers. Key among them was Microsoft, whose co-founder Bill Gates immediately saw that the GUI was the future, so much so that Microsoft "had more people working on the Mac than Apple did," according to Gates.

Some of this history is well-understand. For exam...