Apple made headlines this week when it was announced that Doug Field, who joined the company from Tesla in 2018, is leaving to work for Ford. Some analysts saw this is a significant setback for Titan, Apple’s autonomous car project.

This flurry of concern was striking, because looking back over the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech in the past few years, I sometimes think that Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It doesn’t worry about the “metaverse”, content moderation or hacked elections, and newspaper companies haven’t worked out how to shake it down. It just ships.

Every year, with metronomic precision, it delivers another new set of hardware and software, and another set of technology building blocks that fit into a decade-long strategic plan. Never mind Apple in the 1990s — Microsoft in the 1990s could never manage this.