50 years of Apple
We’re celebrating Apple’s 50th birthday with a week of content about the tech giant. It covers everything from personal recollections from our writers to the greatest — and worst — Apple gadgets as voted by you, and you can read it all on our 50 years of Apple page.
I had no idea I was watching a genius’s swan song. Sure, Steve Jobs was painfully thin, pacing the WWDC 2011 stage methodically as he walked through iOS 5, the new iCloud, and macOS Lion, but the audience was mesmerized. Jobs was smart, engaged, excited, and funny. He was Apple.
Apple didn’t falter. Tim Cook slid into the driver’s seat without so much as a pit stop. He took the stage at Apple’s old Cupertino headquarters hours before Jobs died to unveil the iPhone 4s and Siri, and it looked to me as if he’d been doing it his whole life.
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15 years later, as Apple celebrates 50 years as a company, I find myself thinking back to Jobs, Woz, what they built, and why we all just feel differently about Apple.
Apple is special because Jobs was special
Think about it. Apple has its ardent fans and its ardent detractors. What it lacks are people in the middle, those who have no feelings about the company.
Apple was built to be not just a tech company but also an expression of cool. Now ‘cool’ can sound retro or even corny, but this is not some kind of Arthur Fonzerelli cool. It’s an aesthetic that instantly communicates difference. Apple’s choices in hardware and design were, even in its earliest days, imbued with Steve Jobs’ own obsession with craftsmanship and materials.
If Wozniak was the technical genius with a savant’s gift for electronics engineering, Jobs was the one who understood the biology of products. Together, they built computers that connected us with our need to produce and desire to be inspired.
I know many people credit the iconic 1984 commercial with helping to make the first Mac a success. The ad was radical, and memorable at a time when most tech advertising and commercials were programmed to trigger business people’s wallets and not their hearts and minds.
Apple was, and Steve Jobs found it again
Still, it was the product that connected with people on a more visceral level. By 1984, I knew enough about computers to understand that the Mac was something different. By 1985, when I sat in front of my first model, I felt a spark of kinship with technology I’d not previously experienced. I like to assume that the connection traveled from me through the Mac and all the way back to Steve Jobs.
I just as readily remember the time when Apple lost its way in the mid 1980s to the late 90s. With Jobs gone, Apple’s spark dimmed, and it started making uninspiring, boxy computers like everyone else.
I used to train people on these computers, and I remember feeling, well, absolutely nothing. The software was the thing, and Apple’s hardware was simply another delivery vehicle, and a dull one at that.
Typically, you don’t credit a company’s success, let alone individual products, to one person, but then few other companies are Apple.
Steve Jobs’ return didn’t just herald the return of a guiding hand that could help shepherd average products to unwilling consumers. Jobs’ unique gift was how he externalized his emotions and made them tangible in a product.
Wozniak, the electronics wizard, was long gone, and while his absence should have hampered Jobs, it might have emboldened him to follow his own singular product instincts.
Jobs, Ives, and the importance of the Cook factor
With design impresario Jony Ive on board since 1992, Jobs had his perfect partner. They made a formidable pair, but it might be said that the missing piece to the puzzle was the arrival of Tim Cook. If Ive and Jobs were free radicals, Cook was the solid center. A process and supply-chain expert, there might have been no better third leg of the stool for Apple’s soon-to-be exploding product ambitions.
Most people credit the iMac with saving the company, which is sort of true, but it was surely the iPod that cemented Apple’s legacy as the coolest tech company on the planet. Undeniably attractive, the iPod was also a deceptively simple gadget; its sole purpose was music delivery and playback.
Apple did not invent this kind of device. Clunky MP3 players existed for years before the iPod, but Jobs’ commitment to simplicity, elegance, and quality made its portable music device something more.
Tickets to the Steve Jobs show
Jobs’ abilities as a showman and communicator were unmatched in that era. Every time he took the stage in his signature black turtle neck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers, it was an event. Jobs demanded your attention and then earned your applause.
It was obvious to anyone watching that, behind the scenes, Jobs was driving his giant company in ways unimaginable at other tech firms. The exacting call to quality, even perfection; the unending desire for secrecy and wonder.
It didn’t always lead to a great place. The ever-mercurial Jobs hated publicly admitting mistakes (though he was the king of last-minute changes to avoid such mistakes), and he famously went after a tech publication when it accidentally broke through the company’s vaunted secrecy framework (see the iPhone 4 scandal).
In the main, though, Apple under Steve Jobs was a company that attracted the kind of attention usually reserved for A-list celebrities.
Apple under Tim Cook is still cool, but it also feels more predictable. Cook’s biggest swings, like the Apple Watch and Vision Pro, don’t really have his fingerprints on them. Cook can engage and inspire, but there’s no evidence of a roiling current of emotions and creative drive underneath.
There are no whispered tales of Cook sending people back to the drawing board to, say, replace a round Apple Watch with a square face or to put eyes on the outside of Vision Pro. Surely these things happened at some point, but probably not at the last minute, and were more likely the result of careful thought and long-term preparation.
A mature but undiminished Apple
A company that has lasted 50 years cannot be the same as it was in 1976, 1997, 2001, or even just 15 years ago. It’s not just that Apple has changed; the world has changed around it, and the company has naturally matured into more often managing as opposed to making success.
Just look at what passes for growth these days: Services. It’s arguably the fastest-growing part of Apple’s business, but one that is tied to hardware invented and then incrementally refined for years.
Remarkably, Apple is still cool in 2026. People still care more about what it does than most any other tech company — heck, any other company. Credit Tim Cook with that. He’s not Steve Jobs, but he long ago recognized the need to not just keep Jobs’ memory alive, but keep his Apple soul intact. If that soul still lives somewhere, it’s at the center of Apple Campus’s giant ring.
By some measures, Apple Park was Steve Jobs’ last great idea, and serves as a constant reminder of his sprawling ambition and uncanny ability to know what we wanted before we wanted it. It’s a ring of ambition and ideas, and so unusual and memorable that it helps keep the idea of Apple as the coolest company on the planet alive.
That day in June, 2011, when I watched Steve Jobs make his last big presentation, I knew I was witnessing something special: a tech and business unicorn, a once-in-a-lifetime maverick who built something special and left it to his business heirs. They could have bungled it, but such was Jobs’ passion that the fire, while sometimes waning, has never burned out. It was the undeniable engine of these first 50 years — we’ll see if if continues to burn brightly enough to carry Apple forward for another 50.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
