Fifty Years of Apple

A Love Letter From Someone Who Never Stopped Believing

I was 18. No job. No plan. Just a kid wandering into a computer store to kill time.

Then I saw it. A translucent, candy-coloured CRT iMac — bondi blue — glowing like it had been dropped from another planet. I had never heard of Apple. I had no idea who made it or why. I just stood there, completely still, feeling something I couldn’t name.

I fell in love. Not with a product — with the idea that a machine could make you feel something. That was the day I became an Apple fanboy. And I never looked back.

Today, Apple turns 50. And I’m sitting here, fighting back tears trying to put that into words.

A Garage. Two Steves. And Everyone Else Is Gone.

April 1, 1976. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed a partnership agreement in a garage in Los Altos, California. Think about what the tech world looked like then — Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Wang, Osborne, Digital Equipment. Hundreds of companies, blazing bright, all fighting for the future.

Most of those names sound like museum exhibits now. Because they are. Apple is still here — the most valuable company on Earth for much of the last decade. That isn’t luck. That’s something else entirely.

The Return, the iMac, and the Fire That Never Should Have Gone Out

The story should have ended in 1985 when the board pushed Jobs out of his own company. Without him, Apple drifted into the 1990s — too many products, no focus, nearly bankrupt. Michael Dell publicly said he’d shut Apple down and return the money to shareholders.

Then Jobs came home. He cancelled 70% of Apple’s products in his first year back. Called Bill Gates. Brought in Jony Ive. And made that bondi-blue iMac that stopped a clueless teenager dead in his tracks.

That iMac wasn’t just a computer. It was Steve saying: we’re back — and we’re not sorry.

The iPod, the Bike Ride, and That Feeling

When I finally saved enough for my first Apple product, I bought an iPod. I remember everything: the weight of it, the cold aluminium in my palm, the click wheel spinning under my thumb. The white earbuds going in.

I got on my bike and rode.

A thousand songs in your pocket. Every street, every corner, every ride home became a scene from your own personal movie. I felt genuinely, completely free.

That is what Apple did at its best. It didn’t make products. It changed how you experienced being alive. I watched Apple move from PowerPC to Intel chips, then back to their own Apple Silicon with the M1 — a full circle that only a company with total confidence pulls off. I never missed a single keynote. Not one. I cleared my calendar, refreshed my browser, and waited for a man in a black turtleneck to say two words that made the whole world lean forward:

“One more thing.”

The iTunes Store. The MacBook Air sliding out of a manila envelope. And that January morning in 2007 when Jobs held up a glass rectangle and said, “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” — paused — and added: “These are not three separate devices. This is one device.” The audience erupted. I erupted. The world changed.

October 5, 2011

I remember exactly where I was. Someone walked in and said the words quietly. “Steve Jobs died.”

I never met the man. Never shook his hand. But I sat at my desk and I wept. Not polite sadness — real, deep, embarrassing grief. Because Steve Jobs wasn’t just Apple’s CEO. He was Apple’s soul. He was the reason a machine could make you feel something. He was the reason those keynotes felt like going to church.

Jobs was singular — maddening, demanding, sometimes ruthless, but almost always right. He handpicked his people. He embedded his taste, his obsessions, his standards so deeply into Apple’s DNA that the company has run on that inheritance for fifteen years and still made the world’s best products. That is the scale of what one man built.

That day, as an Apple fanboy, felt like the death of Apple. Not because I thought the company would collapse. But because I knew something irreplaceable had left with him.

Brilliant Business. Missing Soul.

Tim Cook is not a bad CEO — he’s a spectacular one by every conventional measure. Under his watch Apple crossed $3 trillion in market cap, built an unshakeable services business, and navigated pandemics and trade wars without breaking stride.

But.

Tim Cook is a supply chain genius. He is not someone who wakes up at 3am with a sketch of something the world has never seen. He doesn’t haunt the design studios the way Jobs did. Apple’s keynotes today are slick and professional — but when is the last time one made your hands go cold with genuine excitement? When is the last time a product made you feel the way that bondi-blue iMac made me feel?

Steve put his passion, his vision, his neuroses — his soul — into every product. You could feel it. Apple today makes great products. But that feeling? I miss it. Desperately.

Happy Birthday, Apple. I’m Still on That Bike.

Fifty years. One garage. Two Steves. A hundred dead competitors and one company that refused to die — that came back from the dead, twice, and changed the world both times.

Apple has over 2 billion active devices in use today. The iPhone changed how every human being on Earth communicates, pays, navigates, and sees the world. That is not a product launch. That is a civilisational event — born in a garage by a 21-year-old who simply refused to make anything ugly.

I hope Apple finds that fire again. I hope somewhere in those glass buildings in Cupertino, someone is awake at 3am with an idea that frightens them. I hope the next decade makes us feel the way 2007 felt. The way 1998 felt.

I’m still that 18-year-old. Still watching every keynote. Still wanting every product. Still riding with white earbuds in, feeling like the world was made just for me.

Happy 50th Birthday, Apple.
I never stopped believing.