It was in 1989 that Lou Reed wrote the song The Last Great American Whale. It was a song about an innocent species of whale that was killed by American greed and lack of care for the environment. Apple is beginning to suffer from those woes. Today Apple can perhaps be seen as the last great American whale, a company that took consumer electronics by the scruff of the neck and turned it on its head, taking advantage of the transition of music from analog to digital, and then opportunistically turned touch capability, invented elsewhere, into a technology franchise that created a new paradigm for portable devices. In stock market terms it was massive, and it still has a cash…