On his excellent blog Daring Fireball, John Gruber thinks it’s silly to question if Apple’s growth can continue. His arguments are largely right, but I think there’s some other issues.

For one, a bunch of companies have broken the $500 billion market cap level and none have lasted long. In fact, no company have been number 1 for more than a few years in modern history.

Apple is a remarkable innovative company, but two things are likely to happen:

1. Investors are used to the company doubling in value every 18 months. Is AAPL really going to have a market cap of $2 trillion in early 2015? Investors are dummies. They are greedy and they will demand unreasonable things. And now that Jobs is gone, once the inevitable slow down of growth happens, some messiah figure will promise he can return the company to the prosperity of the Jobs era. Then he will destroy everything.
2. Even if Apple defends itself from dummy investors, the government will step in. Being the biggest corporation makes it a target of the left. We’ve seen it already from Mike Daisey and others. Eventually the people will demand that Apple is returned to a reasonable size. How long before regulators the world over step in every time Apple releases something new?