The Back Page: Everything is fine until it isn’t

And thus was Tim Cook finally brought low—not by Apple’s anti-union practices, nor by his continued willingness to do business with a charming individual like Elon Musk, nor even by Apple’s questionable relationships with the Chinese government.

But by an iPhone case.

The tapestry of Cook’s descent is woven finely, with threads coalescing from across his tenure. As the history books tell us, the beginning of the end for Tim Cook’s regime at Apple, those many years ago, was precipitated by what seemed the most reasonable of initiatives: replacing leather goods with a more environmentally sustainable material. After all, who ever got in trouble for not slaughtering a sacred cow?

The problem, however, lay in the new material. An attempt to ape the feel of premium suede, it proved vulnerable to scratches, easily stained, and less durable than the animal-based material it had supplanted.

All of that would have been bad enough, but the subsequent revelation that the so-called fabric was nothing more than cut-up patches of Eddy Cue’s suits shook the Apple community to its very core.…