Apple’s 50th Anniversary
Fifty years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief — radical at the time — changed everything.
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At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.
Apple today announced that it will celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary over the coming weeks, but it has yet to reveal any specific plans.
Previously:
Update (2026-03-17): John Gruber:
But what also makes it so Cook-ian is that it’s so utterly anodyne. It’s inoffensive to the point of being unmemorable. The best part of Cook’s letter is when he harks back and explicitly quotes from an Apple ad campaign from 30 years ago.
Previously:
Update (2026-03-30): Harry McCracken:
Today, as Apple turns 50, its presence in our lives is so pervasive—2.5 billion of the company’s devices are in active use—that its unlikely origin story is more resonant than ever. To tell it, I turned to the people who lived it[…]
This feature from Harry McCracken is just spectacularly good.
If the 50th anniversary celebrations and talk have made you curious about Apple history, there are a lot of books out there. Here are some recommendations[…]
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Ah, the older days of Apple computers, when using a Macintosh was actually fun.
“ At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday”
Translation: we don’t fix bugs.
"If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
Different kind of crazy this time (the kind that murders people in the street, kidnaps people of color, kidnaps heads of state, and starts wars). Hard to forget Cook serving up gold prizes to this kind of crazy.
See? I'm thinking different.
All this looking back accomplishes is reminding me how lame, evil, and mediocre Apple has become. They’d probably do better to ignore the past because Apple today only looks good compared to Apple in the mid 90s, when they also had a bloated product line, expensive and underpowered computers, and poor software quality
@Manx I remember the mid-90s as being a time of relatively better software (in terms of design and bugs, albeit without memory protection and such) with the hardware as you describe.
The 90s were a great time for Mac users. The LC/Performa line of computers offered good value, looked nice, and you could fricken open and upgrade them without even using a screwdriver, you could just unclip the cover. The Mac Classic was also a great computer.
Did Apple make too many different devices? Sure. But that's bad for *Apple*, not for me as a customer who has way more choice.
Software was amazing, extremely strong focus on clear, efficient design.
That was also a time when Apple tried genuinely cool stuff, like the QuickTake cameras, the Newton and eMate, and the Pippin.
Today's Apple looks terrible compared to *any* past Apple, even at past Apple's worst.
This piece of internet folklore sums it up pretty nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E25nzI7jhgM
