2026-04-01 01:00:07
Yes, here in our universe, Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary. A milestone! The company is looking back on its success, its technology prowess, and the way it’s made us all willing to just say “AirPods” like that’s a set of words that makes any kind of sense.
But our universe is only one of many, and while it may be the 50th anniversary of Apple in several of those as well, the company hasn’t always been as successful—or at least as successful in quite the same way—as it has been here.
For example, did you know that on Earth 1208⍺-X, Apple never abandoned cat names for its operating system? They’re currently on Mac OS X 10.21 Norwegian Forest Cat. Meanwhile, on Earth 9876t-♉︎, the Pippin is the number two console, right after the Intellivision. And on Earth 632r-⍴ everybody wears iPod Socks. Nobody’s quite sure if it’s ironic or not.
All of these worlds are like ours, but ever so slightly different. And just in case you think the grass is always greener on the other side of the quantum fence, well, be careful what you wish for. As much as some people might deride Liquid Glass, be glad you don’t live on Earth 9w4598-Ω, where Apple really ran with that whole “lickable” interface thing. Computing has never been so sticky.
So let’s take this opportunity to fire up the old mulitversal radio and see if we can’t catch some dispatches from our nearby universes and see how Apple is doing there.
[static sounds]
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Apple today released its most groundbreaking product in decades, the Orb.
“Nothing is more iconic than the shape of the sphere,” said Apple CEO Jony Ive, appearing via towering hologram. “It has no beginning, no end, and speaks to where we all first issued from.”
“We think the Orb will be a big hit,” said Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak, visibly sweating. “Our customers see whatever they want to see in it which means it can truly be any…”
[static sounds]
…Apple today celebrated its 50th anniversary with the release of its most powerful computer yet, the Macintosh Quadra 3700X/II. Powered by an amazing 69050 Motorola processor running at speeds of up to 700Mhz with an astounding of 1GB of RAM and 200GB Western Digital hard drive, the 97300xfs/II will be the workstation of choice for high-end graphics applications. Its sturdy tower comes in a fetching beige, features 17 SCSI ports, and begins at just $8,999…
[static sounds]
…and Apple CEO for Life Steve Wozniak today kicked off the 27th annual Segway Polo World Cup in Cupertino’s Steve Jobs Memorial stadium, as teams from across the globe vie to become the latest champions of the vaunted sport that has become a Silicon Valley phenomenon…
[static sounds]
…would have been the 50th anniversary of Apple Computer. The now defunct company was acquired in 1997 by Dell Computer and shut down, the money returned to its shareholders. Dell, meanwhile, continues its innovative sales strategy of selling laptops by the pound…
[click]
Annnnd that’s about enough of that. Look, I won’t say that all of those universes are unquestionably worse than ours. Just as a random example, in not a single one of those other universes did Apple gift anybody odious a big golden trophy. I mean, you can only imagine what the rest of those universes think of us.
Anyway, with half a century under its belt, it’s time to start thinking about what the next 50 years might hold. I don’t want to spoil anything, but, well, better stock up on iPod Socks.
2026-04-01 00:05:45
In addition to my two pieces on The Verge this week, I’m also on the Vergecast talking to David Pierce about Apple’s past, present and future:
On this episode of The Vergecast, we begin by stepping back a bit to ask a big question: How is Apple doing right now? Obviously, by many measures, Apple’s doing great — trillion-dollar company and whatnot — but this is a company that has long taken pride in building better software, better hardware, better everything, and doing it in a better and cooler and more responsible way. Jason Snell, a longtime chronicler of all things Apple, joins the show to do a modified version of the annual Six Colors report card about where Apple stands right now.
It was a great conversation, and nice to talk about where Apple is going, given all the history that I’ve been writing about for the last few weeks.
2026-03-31 22:13:18
It’s a famous story on its way to becoming legendary: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985, spent more than a decade in the wilderness, and then returned to Apple in 1997 to save it from bankruptcy and transform it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.
That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.
From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.
2026-03-31 19:00:17
Let me tell you how the Mac changed my life.
In 1988 my high school form tutor, who was also head of the art department, got a Mac Plus. It was the only one in the school, as the computer room was all BBC Micros. In fact, so he said, it was one of the only school-owned Macs in England. It was kept in a locked office room, annexed off his classroom.
I loved playing computer games, and like all kids, I’d messed around with typing in BASIC programs from magazines. But whenever I strayed beyond the simple commands – LOAD, SAVE, PRINT, GOTO – I was out of my depth. I’ve never been able to get my head around DOS-like command line interfaces, let alone programming languages. They just don’t make sense to me, I’m all at sea.
(I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s because I always looked at computers as a tool, a way to do something, rather than a thing to do.)
So I don’t know why my tutor showed off that Mac to me, of all people. But I was gobsmacked by the visual interface and the tangibility of its spatial permanence model. ‘This icon here is your file. This window represents the space inside a folder. If you move the file into the folder, it will still be there, in that same visually-defined place, when you look inside again later.’
I know that sounds like the simplest, most obvious thing now, but in the 1980s it really wasn’t. Crucially, unlike a command line, it made sense to me.
So I was sold on the interface. But then what really blew my mind were the programs you could run on this thing. MacPaint. MacWrite. PageMaker. And the fonts! 12 different fonts you could place anywhere, change their size, make (some of) them bold or italic… again, this is simple and obvious stuff now, but not then.
For some reason, I don’t think any other pupils really took to that Mac. But I was hooked, and spent a lot of time in that cramped office room. I proceeded to use the Mac Plus’s tiny mono bitmap screen, paltry RAM, and single floppy drive to design and lay out two school magazines, one edition of the sixth-form ‘zine, and several judges’ pamphlets for the annual music and drama festivals1 – plus a bunch of, um, extracurricular stuff for my regular RPG gaming group: character sheets, combat resolution tables, equipment lists…
The ironic thing is, at no point did anyone tell me that what I was doing with this Mac could be a career. My work experience at the local newspaper had shown me that ‘layout’ was something done by chain-smoking men using bromides, cow gum, and rubylith – not computers. The very thought! So after flunking my A-levels (too much partying, not to mention fooling around on that Mac), I was a little unmoored and took the first office job I saw that sounded vaguely interesting: selling stationery.
I was an OK office drone, but my creative bent was obvious to everyone. My free time back then was dominated by games, music, and art. So, encouraged by my boss to go back to school and do something creative, I flicked through the local art college brochure… and found a course called ‘graphic design’. It even mentioned using Macs. Suddenly, I was back in that annexed room, designing a school magazine, and I knew what I wanted to do.
Perhaps the most amazing thing is how small the window of time and opportunity was where all of this could happen. Much earlier, and Macs barely existed; much later, and they were already in professional use everywhere. I was lucky enough to be right in that sweet spot.
I’ve been a professional writer for 30 years now, full-time for 24. That’s how most everyone knows me. But for almost a decade prior to that, I was a graphic designer at various agencies and publishers, eventually specialising in magazines. It was working in those places that gave me access to the net, and an online community that encouraged me to take fiction writing seriously. (Shout-out to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo!)
There’s a whole chain of happenstance and chance events, too long to go into here, that led to me eventually being published. But if you follow it back far enough, that chain started with my form tutor introducing me to a strange new computer, which changed my life.
Happy birthday, Apple.
2026-03-31 05:18:50
Jason and Myke tell the story of Apple’s origin. It emerged from the unique environment of the Santa Clara valley suburbs of the ’70s thanks to the particular genius of its two co-founders and some surprising help they got along the way.
2026-03-31 01:00:34
After I wrote my Wall Street Journal review of David Pogue’s excellent Apple: The First 50 Years (Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books) my editor asked for a sidebar recommending other books about Apple. I consulted my own collection and also asked a few of my friends.
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:
Insanely Great (1994) by Steven Levy. This is the definitive story of the original Mac, placed in the context of the 1980s personal computing revolution. Levy, whose 1984 book Hackers is an astounding history of the early days of computing, gets at the heart of what made that original Mac, and the original Mac team, special. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone. If the year of publication doesn’t tell you what this is about, the subtitle will: “How the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane.” Recommended by John Siracusa, this is the story of Apple falling apart in the 1990s. (Amazon, used.)
On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple (1999) by Gil Amelio and William L. Simon. Of course Gil Amelio’s tell-all about his brief tenure as Apple CEO is self-serving. And yet I enjoyed reading it, because I believe that late-90s Apple was just as messed up as he describes it, especially when it came to the utter failure to replace classic Mac OS that led to Apple buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs. Was Amelio a bozo, like Jobs apparently claimed? Maybe, but you can’t deny that he was there at a pivotal moment and made the single most important decision in Apple’s history. (Used.)
Apple Confidential 2.0 (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer. Prior to the publication of David Pogue’s book, this was probably the best collection of stories about the history of Apple. It’s still an entertaining read. (PDF, used.)
Revolution in the Valley (2011) by Andy Hertzfeld. One of the core members of the original Macintosh team has a lot of amazing stories to tell. We think of the tech industry today as being corporate, but the original Mac was almost a countercultural object. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
The Perfect Thing (2006) by Steven Levy. Levy does his “Insanely Great” thing again, but this time about the creation of the iPod. You may think, well, the iPod’s pretty dated technology now, why does it matter? But this book gives you some clear insight into the entire product development process in the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Creative Selection (2019) by Ken Kocienda. I’m not convinced that the definitive insider history of the creation of the iPhone has been written yet. But between Pogue’s book and this account from one of the creators of the original iPhone keyboard, we’ve got at least some good tales from that vital period. Here’s my original review. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Apple in China (2025) by Patrick McGee. This is the definitive book of the Tim Cook era, at least so far, but it also covers as far back as engineering decisions made right after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Even if you’re not interested in the Chinese angle, this book is worth reading because it reveals how Apple became and remains a titan of manufacturing, which is why it seems capable of building products nobody else can build. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Steve Jobs in Exile (coming May 2026) by Geoffrey Cain. A detailed look at Steve Jobs after he left Apple, including everything that went wrong at NeXT—and how it made Jobs a better CEO when he returned to Apple. This book isn’t out yet, but I’ve read it and it’s quite good. (Pre-order: Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books.)
(Pro tip: The used books are really cheap, and it’s kind of fun to read an old, beat-up book when thinking about Apple’s history.)
