What does "microcosm" mean?
Native speaker’s answer
Rebecca
A microcosm is a place, community, or situation that can be considered as representing in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger. For example, a town that reflects the characteristics or demographics of the whole country it's in. It would be considered a "little world" or "microcosm" of a larger whole. So Tim Cook is saying here that the ATT debate is actually representative of a larger debate that they had been having in the company. Ex: This snow globe is like a microcosm of my city during winter. Ex: We sampled subsets of the population to draw conclusions about the whole population. This is an example of a microcosm.