“This is the death of an American icon,” I heard a television reporter saying as I got to the General Motors building in Manhattan for the announcement of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The only icon in sight, however, was the bitten apple over the glass entrance to Apple's subterranean Fifth Avenue store.

Steve Jobs' company located its flagship New York outlet below the plaza of the GM building as if literally to undermine the carmaker and its devalued brands. Up there is the old symbol of American innovation, winks the glass cube, but down here is the new one.

Apple was itself reinvented when Mr Jobs returned in 1997 to the company he founded and turned the iMac into the world's coolest personal computer, before unveiling the iPhone as an encore. Now Fritz Henderson, GM's chief executive, must do the same in Detroit.