David Einhorn.

When David Einhorn, the poker-playing hedge fund superstar, decides to publicly take on a company whose stock he owns (or has shorted), he usually gets results. Once you establish a reputation for astute calls on Wall Street—Mr. Einhorn’s most famous being his bearish call on Lehman in the spring of 2008—the lemmings can’t help but follow. His latest target: Apple.

Mr. Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital owns more than $600 million worth of Apple, but like others, he thinks the company needs to shake free of a months-long rut. To that end, Mr. Einhorn made clear last week his wish that the company become more flexible in how it thinks about returning cash to shareholders. It’s no small matter, considering that Apple has $137 billion of the stuff sitting on its books, and he sued the company over a possible violation of securities laws last week to make his point. The stock rallied 3 percent on Thursday as a result.

The question of whether or not Apple should do as Mr. Einhorn wishes is an interesting one. On the one hand, Apple has never kowtowed to the needs or wants of Wall Street. On the other, that was a legacy of Steve Jobs, and Mr. Jobs’s successor Tim Cook has to be somewhat concerned about the company’s precarious status as a stock market darling. Returning more cash to shareholders can only help in that regard. Smarty-pants commentators will of course point out that with no external financing needs to speak of, Apple need not pay any mind to Mr. Einhorn or any other institutional investor. But what of its employees? As singular as it may be, the company does have competitors. And when you’re trying to retain your people, a rising stock price beats a falling one.

My bet is that the company caves, but not in the precise way Mr. Einhorn wishes. These are proud people, after all, and there’s no way they’re going to let some guy from New York tell them what to do. But they’re also smart enough to know that $137 billion is too much, and that taking care of shareholders becomes a more nuanced challenge when growth begins to moderate.

In suing Apple, Mr. Einhorn took an issue everyone had already been talking about and put it on the front page. More interesting than the question itself is the fact that nearly every piece of coverage about it—in papers, on TV, in the blogosphere—invoked the label “activist investor” when describing Mr. Einhorn. The term, which is generally applied to hedge fund managers who buy a stake in and then urge companies into some sort of action, has never been explicitly derogatory. But the arrival of said “activism” is usually remarked upon (or typed) in a certain tone, as if someone had just farted at the dinner table.

Why? Perhaps it’s because its most effective (and self-promoting) practitioners have always been the most arrogant that Wall Street has to offer—from 1980s pioneers Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens to today’s most prominent, Daniel Loeb (he of the poison-pen letters to CEOs and boards) and his contemporary Bill Ackman. Mr. Einhorn is an unusual exception: he’s so self-effacing, it’s almost hard to believe he works on Wall Street at all, let alone as one of its most successful hedge fund managers.

The unspoken criticism of activist shareholders seems to be that they’re in it for themselves, that their activism is just Wall Street greed in one of its many costumes. That may have been true when it came to the old practice of greenmail, or when hedge funders end up profiting at the expense of others by exploiting companies’ capital structures to their sole advantage. But what about when it’s just another common shareholder like you and me? Such activism is great for everyone, isn’t it? If you own Apple stock in your IRA, Mr. Einhorn’s interests are aligned with yours. So why is this “activism” treated with distaste? Have the public equity markets become so disconnected from reality that no one expects the actual owners of companies to have a say in how they are run?

That’s not to say that activism is itself rare. Pershing Square’s Mr. Ackman has done a great—and captivating—job over the last few months of focusing other investors (and perhaps securities regulators) on a simple question: does multilevel marketing giant Herbalife have many—any?—customers beyond its distributors? If not, it’s a pyramid scheme. And if that is the case, Mr. Ackman’s short position in the stock will pay off big-time. Deride short-sellers all you want, but the man is just asking a question. Why the hell don’t more big investors do that?

(On the subject of Mr. Ackman, did you see the clip of him doing battle with Carl Icahn on CNBC? It’s a classic, and surely the first time I’ve ever told non-business types that a segment from the cable network is a must-see. Mr. Icahn came across as a bit of a jackass, particularly when he berated the reporter for the audacity of asking him questions, but in the end, he’s just an investor who actually tries to force companies into action. And he’s good at it. Thus, a mea culpa: in a previous column on Mr. Icahn and Netflix, I concluded that his agitation probably wouldn’t result in any movement in that stock. Shares of Netflix have, um, doubled since then. Whether or not it had anything to do with Mr. Icahn seems irrelevant at this point. Nice one, you old dog.)

Mr. Einhorn’s complaint is technical—he’s arguing that by bundling a proposal that would prohibit the company from being able to issue preferred stock without a shareholder vote with some other matters, Apple was somehow violating securities laws. But that’s the law for you—sometimes the only way into an issue is through the side door.

There are two reasons Apple’s other large institutional shareholders haven’t tried that door. One: Apple doesn’t give a shit what its shareholders want. It never has. So some investors have surely (and correctly) concluded that it wasn’t worth the effort. Two: institutional shareholders are a bunch of wimps. They don’t apply pressure on outrageous CEO pay, decry stupid mergers or acquisitions, or move for entire boards to be fired in instances of egregious failings of oversight. Most of them, in other words, are a CEO’s dream.

Shouldn’t an owner be able to ask questions about strategy or execution? Even CalPERS—the nation’s largest pension fund—which The Wall Street Journal referred to on Friday as “a loud voice on corporate governance,” isn’t really all that. It only became concerned about the Freedom Group—maker of the AR-15 Bushmaster, the favored gun of mass murderers—after  it was used to savage effect Newtown, Conn. That’s not activism. That’s covering your ass in the court of public opinion. Strangely, CalPERS supports Apple’s desire to restrict itself in the ways it can pay out cash to shareholders. Don’t ask me why.

Of course, if you don’t like what management is doing, you are free to sell your shares and take your money elsewhere. (Why anyone would ever own shares in Wall Street firms themselves, for example, which Andy Kessler described to me once as compensation schemes masquerading as publicly owned companies—“they literally exist to pay out half of their revenue as compensation”—is beyond me. But that’s a discussion for another time.)

And yet we still erupt in spasms of disbelief when activists make a ruckus. But really, people, which is more unbelievable? That some hedge fund guy has the audacity to ask a company to consider a change, or that the rest of us have come to accept the status quo? In an interview with CNBC last week, Mr. Einhorn said that when he finally got Apple CEO Tim Cook on the phone after failing to make headway with the company’s CFO, Mr. Cook told him that he hadn’t even been told about Mr. Einhorn’s concerns. Steve Jobs would be proud.

Blogger Barry Ritholtz chastised Mr. Einhorn in a post last Friday for trying to salvage a poorly timed investment in Apple stock by pushing the company to release more cash, and coined a “law of activist fund managers”—“No matter how much money a company makes for investors, they all eventually want more.” But why shouldn’t they? They own the damn thing.

Mr. Ritholtz knows how to get attention as effectively as the activists he mocks—he titled the post “The Colossal Gall of Bad Apple Investors”—and he decreed that Apple’s decision to sit on that obscene pile of cash is simply part of its genius. In his mind, Mr. Einhorn’s move is not a reasonable request from an owner of more than $600 million of stock but simply the sour grapes of a sore loser. But that’s absurd. By that reasoning, an owner of a stock that has gone up a lot before going down has no right to question management. The fact that we react with surprise when they do says more about us than it does about them.

Photo illustration by Ed Johnson.

I’m sure you heard the big news about Apple last week.

What? The bottom fell out of the company’s stock, you say? Nearly $52 a share—almost 9 percent—to $533?

That wasn’t what I was referring to. I meant to point you instead to a report from ABC News that revealed that the number of parents naming their daughters Apple jumped 15 percent in 2012, while the number who named their boys Mac went up 12 percent. So it’s official: we don’t own our Apple products or our Apple stock, my friends; they own us. They don’t just allow us to call each other anymore—they now tell us what to call each other. (Even Siri as girl’s name rose 5 percent. Eat your heart out, Suri Cruise.)

But okay, let’s talk about the stock, if that’s on your mind. And why shouldn’t it be? The company, which accounts for a remarkable 4 percent weighting in the S&P 500 index, is, as they say in the trade, a bellwether. If you don’t own it outright, you own it in an index fund or your pension fund or somewhere else. As goes Apple, so goes the national investing mood. Apple is our future! Look out below!

So Apple was bringing us down last week, an unusual occurrence for the stupendously successful company whose legendary guiding force Steve Jobs was an enthusiastic acid head. Apple customers may still be peaking, but its investors have surely begun to wonder whether they’re suddenly staring into the gaping maw of a bad trip.

Where’s the love, Wall Street? Because it was also last week that Apple CEO Tim Cook promised to bring jobs (not Jobs) back to the United States. Who does that anymore? And if Apple is our economy, and Apple makes a move to bolster our economy, shouldn’t that bode well for Apple stock? Reading the fine print, it turned out he was only talking about 200 jobs or so.

Wait, how does that even qualify as news? Oh right, it’s Apple!

Or maybe the trouble was that Mr. Cook only pledged to put a laughably paltry $100 million of the company’s own money behind the move. This from a firm with about $30 billion in cash on its balance sheet. Stop the presses! Wait, what presses? The Apple economy has destroyed the news business. There are no more presses. Go read about it on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or your iPad.

Explaining stock price movements with a simple narrative is a fool’s errand, no matter what CNBC or Bloomberg will tell you, but seeing as we’re tripping balls here, we might as well give it a shot. Why is Apple’s stock in free fall? Because the iPad mini isn’t a new product, just a smaller version of an old one. Because not enough people have bought the iPhone 5. Because the beautiful notion of Apple crushing the cable television oligopoly with an elegant interface is still a pipe dream. And because its patent war with Samsung is going the way all patent wars go, which is nowhere, and those Galaxy phones and tablets keep on selling.

It’s not that Apple isn’t still blowing the doors off, performance-wise. It’s that there’s only so much one can expect from a single company. Apple is now competing against itself, and that’s a pretty high bar to top.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of an Apple fan as anyone. I’ve been an Apple customer since about 1981, when my parents bought me an Apple II+. I own six Apple products at the moment, and I love every single one of them. I’ve bought numerous iPads as gifts. All this in spite of the obvious disdain the company shows for its customers, whether it’s through planned obsolescence or shitty customer service (is there any customer support function more enraging than the Genius Bar?).

And what of the cult of Steve Jobs? I’m not immune to fan-boy behavior—there was a time when I would read anything anyone wrote about Bob Dylan—but the whole Steve Jobs thing seems a little, well, excessive. I don’t usually speak ill of the dead, but has there ever been a bigger credit hog than this guy? Even he seemed to believe that Apple was a one-man show, a myth that’s been proven blatantly false as the company continues to roll along just over a year after his death. (I made this point before he died, though, so consider me on the record before his premature death. RIP Steve Jobs. I really was a fan, but you’re no Bob Dylan.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that things have really—finally—gone too far. Fortune has a writer whose entire job seems to be to write about Apple. It would be a great job, of course, but is there really that much to say about a maker of computer hardware and software, even if it does do $150 billion in annual sales? Answer: not really, but people like to read about it. And so we write. Another scribe at Fortune called the stock a value play this week. Note to investors: there are no value plays in technology. Just ask Research in Motion. Or Microsoft. Or Dell. You’re either a growth story or you’re nothing at all.

So the open question is whether this is a growth story anymore. Some apparently believe it is not: the good people at Bespoke Investment Group pointed out last week that Apple’s 6.45 percent drop on December 5 was the first dip of more than six percent since December 2008. It’s only happened 20 times in the last decade. But after four years of hallucinatory success, here we are. When a stock’s 50-day morning average falls below its 200-day moving average, the technical analysts call it a “death cross.” And Apple is on the verge of that ominous-sounding development. In other words, more and more people are bailing on this stock. The only question now is how many more will follow.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Apple start falling victim to emotional stock market behavior, given as it’s the company’s own damned iPhones that so often put the rest of us into emotional tailspins in real life. Why hasn’t she texted me back? She must be in bed with some other guy! Why hasn’t he liked my Facebook post? Because he’s probably emailing with some girl from his office instead! Why does this map app still suck so badly? And why can’t they fix the bugs in Words With Friends?

My friend Susan recently took off to New Orleans for four days by herself. Beyond the fact that she loves the music of Rockin’ Dopsie, one of the reasons she did so was to disconnect as much as possible (if only for a long weekend) from the always-on life that Apple and its imitators have hooked us into, whether we signed up for it or not. She wasn’t that successful in her quest—I received a not-entirely-necessary text message that included a photo of a soft-shell crab po’boy mid-weekend—but she was right to at least give it a try.

Because things really have gone too far. Do any of us actually need to be staring into our iPhone screens all day, from the subway to the street corner to the elevator to the dinner table? The sane answer is no, but walk down the street in any city in this country and you will see that iPhone addiction trumps sanity, hands down. So this really is your fault, Apple. You are now a cliché—the victim of your own success—and this is the universe paying you back for your crimes against humanity. Only this time, the only thing everyone is looking at on their iPhones is your plummeting stock price.

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In June, The Observer celebrated Pride Week by publishing a list of New York's most powerful gay men and women; we didn't include now-newly-minted Apple CEO Tim Cook, as his base seems to be Cupertino. But that doesn't mean he doesn't suit our other criteria. As we wrote in June, "gay power seems more or less the same as any other sort of power in society." During our visit to Fire Island during we learned that young gay men weren't familiar with gay icons, and didn't need to be. The power they were accruing could be spent across society, not just in some separate gay world.

While some believe that Tim Cook came out today, it's been public information for a while: he was featured on Out's Gay 50, though he didn't speak on the record for it. While it might behoove him to be a bit more open, this is, broadly speaking, precisely the right balance to strike. While Felix Salmon at Reuters argued that no one should "ignore Tim Cook's sexuality"--that keeping Tim Cook in the closet would do him more harm than good. Dwelling on the issue beyond today, at the expense of reporting in detail on Mr. Cook's accomplishments or failings as CEO, is to keep him in the sort of separate-from-society sphere that openly gay executives who define themselves too as politicians, lawyers, and artists avoid.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_