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.
Pull them all together, and this lexical timeline tells a bigger story about how Apple has built its image over the past five decades — and how that image has been embraced, challenged and mocked along the way.
1. ‘The computer for the rest of us’
Long before Apple was the tech behemoth it is today, it was a smaller company looking to position itself as something different from its much larger competitors — one that wanted to make technology feel simpler and more accessible.
That idea started from Apple’s very first marketing brochure in 1977, which declared that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” — a hat tip to the design-led philosophy the company, and Steve Jobs in particular, was keen to project from the outset.
Seven years later, Apple sharpened that message with the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, and the strapline “The computer for the rest of us”. It leaned heavily into the same ideas of simplicity and accessibility, but with added warmth that was largely absent from the more business-focused computer industry (cough, IBM) at that time.
While sales of the first Macintosh dipped quickly after an initial flurry of interest, the slogan endured because it captured Apple’s early ambition of creating tech that felt more approachable and user friendly.
2. ‘I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC’
By the time Apple launched its 2006 “Get a Mac” TV campaign, it was no longer trying to rescue its identity so much as to sharpen it — and the key contrast it wanted to draw was between Mac and PC.
The tongue-in-cheek ad series was known for its simplicity. Instead of talking specs, Apple turned the Mac-PC rivalry into a personality clash, with short comedy skits set against a plain white background, and two actors embodying each computing platform.
The PC character was uptight, accident-prone and dressed in a suit – played by John Hodgman in the US and David Mitchell in the UK – while the Mac was younger, cooler, and more relaxed, played by Justin Long and Robert Webb. In each installment they introduced themselves with “I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC”, before acting out a series of comic setups built around their differences in design, security, software and usability.
It was funny, instantly understandable and hugely effective, with Mac sales rising sharply after the campaign’s launch. However, while it helped cement Apple’s position as the ‘cooler’ brand, it also suggested a less flattering side to the company’s image — a new-found confidence that could easily be read as smug.
3. ‘Reality distortion field’
Not every phrase attached to Apple came from a stage or an advert — nor were they all especially flattering. “Reality distortion field”, a phrase taken from Star Trek, was first used by Apple engineer Bud Tribble in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs’ extraordinary powers of persuasion during the Macintosh project — and was one that could be taken one of two ways.
Apparently, Jobs had an incredible ability to make those around him believe almost anything. That helped him win people over with new ideas, convincing them that impossible deadlines were achievable and difficult projects were manageable.
Depending on your view, this was a display of rare visionary leadership or a talent for bending reality to get his own way, at other people’s expense. In reality, it was a bit of both — and was exactly what made Jobs so effective, but also so famously difficult to work with, in equal measure.
4. ‘There’s an app for that’
Back in 2008, Blackberry had a chokehold on the early smartphone market. Compared with the flashy touchscreen iPhone, BlackBerry was seen as the productive option — the phone for Important People who had Important Stuff to do.
The App Store’s launch in 2008 helped to change that, transforming the iPhone from a mere mobile phone into a device with almost endless possibilities. Sure, to start with many of us were mostly downing fake pints of on-screen beer and flicking virtual paper balls into a wastepaper bin, but the potential was palpable.
Apple’s 2009 ad campaign to highlight this was a simple one. “There’s an app for that” captured all of the promise and potential of the new system in a single line, suggesting that whatever problem you had, however niche the task, the iPhone had a solution for it.
This phrase helped to shift the thinking behind the iPhone from slick gadget into a platform. In a year, the App Store saw more than two billion downloads, with the number of apps jumping from 500 to 100,000.
5. ‘One more thing…’
Apple keynote presentations have become a lot more polished (read: pre-recorded) in recent years, but some of the older ones produced some truly memorable on-stage moments. Think Steve Jobs pulling the Macbook Air out of an envelope, or declaring the iPod could hold 1,000 songs, “and fit right in my pocket”.
However, few phrases are as tied to Jobs’ stagecraft as “One more thing”. Used most famously at the tail end of keynotes, it became the moment that people waited for — the cue that a big surprise or long-rumored product was about to be unveiled. As the years went on, some of Apple’s biggest products were kept back for this slot, including the iPod, the iPhone and Apple’s Vision Pro.
Through “One more thing…” Apple really leaned into the growing theater and drama of its keynote speeches, and discovered it wasn’t just about what you announced, but how you announced it.
6. ‘It just works’
Unlike some of Apple’s most famous phrases, “It just works” was never tied to one product or ad campaign. Instead, it was more of a Steve Jobs mantra. He used it repeatedly during keynote speeches when discussing new products or features, to hit home the idea that Apple’s devices and ecosystem were intuitive, seamless and easy to use.
The phrase had not really been used since Jobs’ death in 2011, until Tim Cook used it twice during a January 2019 interview with CNBC. Some commentators saw this this as a very deliberate act — an attempt to reassure the investors after a revenue shortfall, by invoking one of the company’s oldest promises.
7. ‘You’re holding it wrong’
While Apple never actually uttered this exact phrase, it will forever be connected to one of the most infamous PR own goals in the company’s history.
The damning paraphrase came from the company’s disastrous response to so-called ‘Antennagate’ in 2010, when users quickly realized that if they held the new iPhone 4 a certain way, that signal would plummet and calls would drop – something that was nicknamed the “iPhone death grip”.
Jobs reportedly responded directly to press requests for comment with the advice “just avoid holding it that way”, but worse, an official statement followed up with a similar sentiment.
The backlash was swift, not least because the response seemed to show a company so invested in its own design choices that it was happy to blame its users rather than take responsibility. It did eventually back down, offering all iPhone 4 users a free case to help address the issue.
8. ‘Think Different’
By the time Apple launched its “Think Different” campaign in 1997, it was in need of more than a new advertising strap-line; it needed a complete reinvention. Steve Jobs was now back at the company after 12 years away, and was trying to pull the struggling company back from the brink. Its next brand campaign would play a big part in that.
The slogan is widely considered to be a dig at rival IBM’s “Think” branding, with the slightly unconventional grammar also reportedly intentional. It was chosen to echo phrases like “think big”, and to reinforce the idea of Apple as a rebellious outsider that did things, well, differently.
That message was underlined with print and TV ads featuring some of history’s most celebrated creative geniuses, alongside a voiceover that aligned Apple with the audience it most wanted to attract: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers…” It ended with the now famous line: “The people who think they are crazy enough to change the world, are the ones who do”.
9. ‘Bendgate’
Four years after ‘Antennagate’, Apple had a new design problem to overcome. In 2014, just a few days after the launch of the super-slim iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, reports began spreading that the larger model could bend under pressure — including when it was carried in trouser pockets.
Once again, Apple jumped to defend its design, saying that only a handful of customers had been affected, but the internet had already made up its mind: this was ‘Bendgate’.
Apple tried to reassure users by inviting the press into its facilities to show its manufacturing and testing processes, and replacing devices that showed legitimate damage.
However, later court documents showed this had not come entirely out of the blue, and Apple had known the design was more prone to flex than the iPhone 5s.
10. ‘iSheep’
As Apple’s popularity and cultural influence grew, so its detractors got all the more vocal. Apple customers developed a reputation for being blindly loyal, hanging off the company’s every word and buying into every product with very little judgement. In the eyes of those who weren’t a part of the Apple fold, Apple users were followers, rather than free thinkers.
The ‘iSheep’ phrase actually first surfaced in 2006, as part of a guerilla marketing campaign by Sandisk against the iPod, calling for people to say “iDon’t” to the so-called “iTatorship” and cultural conformity.
While the campaign got very little traction, the phrase endured, and was adopted with fervor by Apple’s critics, particularly across online forums and comment sections like the ‘r/Applesucks’ subreddit.
11. ‘Podcast’
Apple did not coin the term ‘podcast’, but it did clearly help to inspire it.
The origins of the word can be traced back to a 2004 Guardian article by journalist Ben Hammersley, who suggested it as the name for a new form of downloadable spoken-word audio. To get there, he had spliced the “iPod” together with “broadcast”, and podcast was born.
As the term gained traction, Apple moved quickly to popularize the format, adding podcast support to iTunes the following year and presenting itself as the company that would take podcasting mainstream — and the rest, as they say, is history.
The iPod may no longer be available, but its cultural impact, and Apple’s influence more broadly, lives on in the name of an enduringly popular medium.
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