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- Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
- Without Steve Jobs, there would be no Mac or iPhone.
- Apple has launched no major new products since the Apple Watch.
Apple turns 50 on April 1, 2026. You’d think this would be a celebration not only of the company and its many landmark products — the Apple II, the Mac, and the iPhone — but also of its legendary founders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
In neither Apple’s official 50th-anniversary announcement nor CEO Tim Cook’s birthday letter are either of the two founders mentioned. While Cook praises “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently,” he doesn’t mention the original misfit pair that set Apple’s course for its first 40 years. When asked about this oversight, Apple didn’t reply. I hope Apple will correct it.
In my view, since the Jobs era, Apple’s success has not come from thinking differently, but from two major factors. The first of these is its locked-in ecosystem, which keeps its users buying Apple products because they won’t work with other devices and programs. Another major factor is its marketing, which has made it the only luxury technology brand.
But it didn’t start that way. Apple began as a scrappy garage outfit selling bare circuit boards.
April 1, 1976
In the spring of 1976, the Jobs family garage in Los Altos was not yet a shrine. It was just a cramped workspace where Wozniak hunched over a workbench, hand-soldering logic boards while Jobs paced and plotted how to sell them.
As Jobs once described to me, the floor was littered with parts and paper. The air smelled of solder flux, sawdust, and the faint exhaust of the Volkswagen bus that he would soon sell to finance their new machine. The Apple I they built there was more promise than product. It was a naked motherboard meant for hobbyists who knew how to add their own keyboard, case, and display.
Also: Remembering Bill Atkinson, the Mac visionary who revolutionized personal computing
Those early days were fueled by the same Homebrew Computer Club stories that now read like myth: engineers passing around schematics, arguing about BASIC interpreters, and dreaming of computers that fellow geeks could actually own. Or, as Wozniak put it, he hoped for a world where “everybody is going to have a computer in their home and going to become technology geeks like us.”
Jobs probably already had other, bigger ideas.
Wozniak’s brilliant, minimalist designs weren’t meant to lock users out. They were meant to squeeze every bit of power out of every chip for an affordable PC. What was affordable? The original Apple II was priced at $1,298 with 4 KB of RAM. The top-of-the-line model, with 48K of memory, cost $2,638 or $15,120 in 2026 dollars. Today, if you find a working Apple 1 in your attic, it would go for over half a million.
Jobs, for his part, dragged prototypes around Silicon Valley, convincing a skeptical local retailer to take 50 Apple I boards on consignment. It was a make-or-break order for a company that technically didn’t yet exist, for a market that was just getting started.
The Apple II generation
The Apple I was a proof of concept, and the Apple II was the moment the dream went mainstream. Introduced in 1977, it arrived not as a bare board, but as a full, beige computer with color graphics, sound, and a friendly design that looked just as at home on a child’s desk as in a school computer lab.
Also: How Apple and other tech brands are selling you on color in 2026 – and it’s working
That proved very apt. For many Gen X kids who grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Apple II was their first computer. Classrooms became Apple’s real market. School districts bought Apple II systems by the cart, rolling them into rooms so students could learn how to type with Mavis Beacon, play “Oregon Trail,” or tinker with Logo turtles crawling across flickering CRTs.
For teachers, Apple’s machines promised not just new lessons, but a new kind of literacy; for Apple, those carts built a generation of users whose first computing memories began with a bitten fruit sticker on the front of a noisy plastic box.
1984, the Mac, and the first fall
By the time the original Macintosh launched in January 1984, Apple had already tasted success and hubris. The famous Apple Big Brother Super Bowl ad cast Apple as the hammer-throwing rebel shattering the gray tyranny of Big Brother, aka IBM. Computers would no longer be the exclusive property of corporate mainframes, green-screen terminals, and the Microsoft-powered first-generation PCs.
Today, we think of all computers as having WIMP-style (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interfaces, but that wasn’t always the case. Xerox PARC in the 1970s was the first to make this GUI a working idea. Jobs came by to visit in 1979, saw it, and fell in love with it.
He’d bring WIMP first to the largely forgotten Lisa computer. For most people, though, it was the Mac that took them into computing’s once-and-future interface. For early adopters, opening MacPaint or MacWrite for the first time was their first exposure to drawings that felt like drawings and to fonts that looked like fonts.
Also: MacBook Neo review: My biggest concern with Apple’s near-perfect budget laptop
The Mac, however, was far from an overnight success. It was expensive; the first, vastly underpowered Mac cost $2,495 and featured a 9-inch black-and-white display, 128KB of RAM, a 400 KB floppy disk drive, and built-in networking. Indeed, it cost so much that, between the Mac’s market failure and the company’s internal fighting, Apple fired Jobs in 1985.
From there, in the mid-1980s and 1990s, Apple drifted into mediocrity. It was the era of beige Mac Performas, clunky clones, and product lines so confusing that even sales staff struggled to keep them straight. Inside Apple, politics helped push Jobs out in 1985, leaving the company without its most forceful advocate for simplicity and focus.
On the outside, loyal fans watched the brand they loved sink into a patchwork of half-remembered machines — Newtons, PowerBooks, Quadras — as Windows PCs marched into homes and offices. For a time, it was not at all obvious that Apple would see its 25th birthday, let alone its 50th.
The return of color and confidence
In the meantime, Jobs, whom I’d first met in the late 1980s, started a new company, NeXT. It was here that he married the Mac idea with open-source BSD Unix to create NeXTStep. You may not know that operating system, but if you’re a Mac user today, you’re using its progeny, MacOS X.
The late 1990s reboot felt like another company wearing the same logo. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he didn’t just reorganize charts. He set out to make people feel something when they saw an Apple product again. One of the most vivid and important computers of that era was the original iMac — the translucent, Bondi blue bubble that turned dull beige boxes into objects of desire.
Also: Apple reportedly working on ‘Ultra’ lineup of devices – including this foldable iPhone
Then, in 2001, came the iPod, the first time Apple slipped into your pocket. The white earbuds became as recognizable as the products themselves — a portable billboard for a lifestyle that merged tech with music and fashion. People remember scrolling those click wheels on buses and in school halls, carrying their entire music collection in a device that felt impossibly small. There had been earlier people-portable computing devices, such as the Palm Pilot I carried everywhere, but it was for business. The iPod was for fun.
The company’s “Think Different” campaign from this period, with its black-and-white portraits of rebels and artists, wrapped Apple’s own tumultuous history in the aura of a broader counterculture. Jobs, a son of the 1960s counterculture, invited customers to see themselves as part of that lineage every time they opened the lid of an iBook or plugged in an iPod.
From the first iPhone lines to a world of Apple
The iPod’s wild success prompted Apple to look beyond it to another, more useful device: the iPhone.
For many, their most vivid Apple memories are of June 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale. People waited in lines that wrapped around Apple Stores and camped out overnight on sidewalks, chatting with strangers who shared nothing but a belief that this slab of glass and metal was worth the wait. Inside the stores, employees clapped as buyers walked out, holding up their cardboard boxes as if they were trophies.
Even today, the iPhone buzz is with us. Every new iPhone announcement is greeted with delight.
In the years that followed, Apple devices have become essential to the lives of many of its fans. Families FaceTime across continents; parents hand down old iPhones to teenagers, and students write their first essays on MacBooks.
Also: I replaced my Sony WH-1000XM6 with the AirPods Max 2 for a week – and didn’t miss a beat
The nostalgia of Apple’s first 50 years isn’t just about products and ads; it’s about the way those objects turned up in photo albums, home movies, and desk drawers long after they were obsolete. An old iPod at the back of a drawer, a yellowing Apple II manual in a box in the attic, a cracked iPhone 4 still powered on for one last backup — each is a small artifact of a broader cultural shift that Apple helped to drive.
Since Jobs’s passing in 2011, Apple has no doubt remained a major force, and his legacy lives on. However, I’d argue that aside from 2015’s Apple Watch, Apple has made no major innovations since his death. The one-time rebel company has become an empire.
Today, Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, but I believe the company has lost its mojo. True, it is worth trillions, but it is no longer the innovative leader it once was. It is running on momentum, and without fresh energy, that can only take it so far.
