离开乔布斯的苹果真心无力续航?

Confession: I was one of the more than 200 sources Yukari Iwatani Kane interviewed for Haunted Empire, the new book about Apple's transition from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook that arrived Tuesday to largely negative reviews.
首先要交代一下，由于《困境中的帝国：后乔布斯时代的苹果》(Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs)一书的缘故，尤加利•伊瓦塔尼•凯恩已经接受了200多次采访，我仅仅是其中之一。这本新书讲述了在后乔布斯时代，由蒂姆•库克执掌的苹果公司(Apple)究竟发生了哪些变化。这本书上周二一面市马上遭遇了大量的负面评价。

I've known since last summer -- and agreed to keep silent about -- the arc of her story. Kane told me in July that she went into the two-year project thinking that if any company could survive the loss of its visionary leader, Apple (AAPL) could. But she came out of it concluding that the company's best days were behind it. Far behind. Not even Jobs, she said, could restore Apple to its former greatness. Tim Cook, his handpicked successor, didn't have a chance.
早在去年夏天，我就知道了她的故事梗概，但我一直信守保持沉默的承诺。凯恩在7月份告诉说，她在启动这个为期两年的写作计划时认为，如果只有一家公司能够在失去有远见的领导者之后继续生存下去，那就是苹果公司。但写完这本书后，她得出一个结论：这家公司最辉煌的岁月已经过去了。一去不复返。她说，就算乔布斯死而复生，他也不能带领苹果公司重现昔日荣耀，更遑论他亲自挑选的接班人蒂姆•库克。

I was intrigued. I knew Kane's byline from the three years she spent covering Apple from the Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau, where she scored some impressive scoops. Chief among them: The front-page news (reported with Joann Lublin) that Steve Jobs had a secret liver transplant in the spring of 2009. This was a reporter who knew how to follow a chain of sources from the periphery of a story to its center. If she had the goods about Apple in the post-Jobs era, I was eager to see them.
我很好奇。我对凯恩的了解源自她在《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal)旧金山分社工作期间对苹果公司持续3年的追踪报道，其中不乏一些令人印象深刻的独家新闻，其中最著名的当属那篇头版新闻（与乔安•卢布林合作），曝光史蒂夫•乔布斯曾在2009年春天做过一次秘密的肝脏移植手术。这是一位知道如何追踪线索链，从一个故事的外围直达核心的记者。如果她掌握了一些关于后乔布斯时代的苹果公司的干货，我很想一睹为快。

I've read the book. And I'm sorry to say that it doesn't deliver.
我已经读完了这本书。非常抱歉，我觉得它不够好。

There is some good reporting in the first third -- the part that covers the last three years of Jobs' life. But as the Guardian's Charles Arthur points out, the last two thirds are infected with an almost toxic bias, a kind of writerly tick that turns everything Kane sees and hears into further evidence that Apple is doomed.
《困境中的帝国》的前三分之一主要讲述乔布斯最后三年的生活，写得还不错。但正如《卫报》(the Guardian)的查尔斯•亚瑟所指出的那样，这本书的后三分之二充斥着一种几乎带有毒性的偏见。凯恩用一种精巧的写作手法，把她看到和听到的一切都转化为彰显苹果公司难逃失败宿命的证据。

Ultimately, Kane's attitude undermines her credibility as a reporter. The book is peppered with conclusions that feel like they were reached before the facts were in.
最终，凯恩的这种态度破坏了她作为一位记者的信誉。书中穿插的结论让人觉得她还没有列举、分析事实，就先入为主地下了定论。

"A decline was inevitable," she writes in her Epilogue, painting Apple's rise and fall in mythical terms:
“衰落不可避免，”她在后记中写道，并采用神话体描绘了一番苹果公司的兴衰史：