It started with a classified ad and a dream that most sensible people would have dismissed.
In the spring of 1976, two young men, one a college dropout with a spiritual bent and a salesman's instinct, the other a self-taught engineering prodigy who could build computers the way other people built model planes, placed an ad in a hobbyist magazine.
The Apple I, a bare circuit board with no case, no keyboard, no monitor, sold for $666.66. Steve Jobs had chosen the price because he liked repeating digits. Steve Wozniak had designed the machine because he wanted one and couldn't afford to buy it.
That summer, Apple Computer Company was incorporated in a garage on Crist Drive in Los Altos, California. Jobs was 21. Wozniak was 25. They had $1,300 between them, raised partly by selling a Volkswagen van.
Fifty years later, Apple is worth more than $3 trillion.
The machine that changed everything
The garage mythology is real, but the company that emerged from it was shaped less by romance than by relentless commercial instinct. Jobs understood, earlier than almost anyone, that personal computers would only matter when ordinary people could actually use them.
The Apple II, released in 1977, was the product that proved the point. It came in a cream-coloured plastic case, had a keyboard, supported colour graphics and arrived in living rooms and classrooms across America. Within three years, Apple had revenues of more than $100 million. It was the fastest-growing company in US history at the time.
The 1980s brought turbulence alongside triumph. The Macintosh, launched in January 1984 with a Super Bowl advertisement that framed IBM as a totalitarian force and Apple as liberation, introduced the world to the graphical user interface. A mouse replaced the command line. Icons replaced code. Computing became visual.
But the internal politics were brutal. Jobs was ousted from his own company in 1985 after a boardroom struggle with then-CEO John Sculley. Apple spent the next decade drifting, releasing a stream of products that sold poorly and confused customers. By 1997, the company was weeks from bankruptcy.
The return, the iPod, and the reinvention of industries
Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 when the company acquired his startup, NeXT. What followed was one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds in business history.
He cut Apple's product line from dozens of items to four. He hired Jony Ive, a British designer whose aluminium and polycarbonate aesthetics would define Apple's visual identity for 20 years. He launched the iMac, a translucent, colourful all-in-one desktop that looked like nothing else on the market, and sold a million units in six weeks.
Then came the iPod in 2001. Apple did not invent the MP3 player, but it built the one people actually wanted. Paired with the iTunes Store, which opened in 2003, the iPod dismantled the music industry's existing business model and replaced it with something new. One thousand songs in your pocket. 99 cents a song. Suddenly, the idea that Apple could disrupt industries that had nothing to do with computers stopped seeming far-fetched.
The iPhone, announced in January 2007, was the fulfilment of everything the iPod had suggested was possible. Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco and told the audience he was introducing three revolutionary products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Then he told them it was one device. The audience laughed, then understood, then went quiet.
The smartphone industry as it had existed, built around physical keyboards and carrier relationships and modest ambitions, effectively ended that day.
A platform, not just a product
The App Store, launched in 2008, transformed the iPhone from a product into a platform. Developers could build software for it. Businesses could reach customers through it. Within two years, there were more than 100,000 apps available. The figure today runs into the millions.
The iPad arrived in 2010, creating a new category of computing that critics initially dismissed as oversized and unnecessary. Schools adopted it. Hospitals used it to replace clipboards. Artists drew on it. The critics were wrong.
The Apple Watch, released in 2015, became the world's best-selling watch within two years of launch. It has since evolved into a health monitoring device capable of detecting irregular heart rhythms, measuring blood oxygen levels and, more recently, tracking sleep apnoea. Cardiologists have reported patients arriving with Apple Watch data that prompted early diagnoses.
The Apple Silicon transition, which began in 2020 when Apple replaced Intel chips with its own M-series processors, demonstrated the company's engineering ambitions in full. Performance gains were substantial. Battery life improved significantly. The Mac, which had been stagnating, became the fastest-growing part of Apple's hardware business.
Fifty years and what comes next
Apple Vision Pro, the spatial computing headset released in 2024, may prove to be the company's most ambitious bet since the iPhone. It may also be a product that takes a decade to find its audience. Apple, more than most companies, has shown it can wait.
In a statement marking the anniversary, chief executive Tim Cook said that thinking differently had always been at the heart of what Apple does. "It's what has driven us to create products that empower people to express themselves, to connect, and to create something wonderful," he said.
The company has also signalled that the next 50 years will be shaped by artificial intelligence, with its Apple Intelligence platform positioning the company in a contest with Google, Microsoft and OpenAI for control of how people interact with computing. Privacy, long a marketing differentiator for Apple, is now a design principle baked into its AI strategy.
From a garage in Los Altos to the most visited retail stores on earth, from a $666 circuit board to a $3 trillion market capitalisation: the story Apple tells about itself, of two people who believed technology could be human, beautiful and transformative, is one of the few pieces of corporate mythology that the evidence broadly supports.
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Fifty years in, the company Jobs and Wozniak started is still, more than anything else, in the business of making people believe the next thing will be the most important thing yet.
So far, it has been right often enough to matter.