Apple at 50: still admiring, still waiting
April 1, 2026. Fifty years ago today, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer in a garage in Los Altos, California. The company that started with a hand-built circuit board now has a market cap north of $3.6 trillion, a billion active devices, and a campus that looks like a spaceship. Apple is celebrating with a campaign called “50 Years of Thinking Different”: concerts, books, museum exhibits. The slogan still works, even if the company behind it has changed.
I’ve been writing about Apple since 2009. I’ve covered product launches, written a tribute when Steve died, argued with Siri, praised their chips, and criticised their timelines. Seventeen years of paying attention to one company. Not because I’m a fan who buys everything, but because Apple makes the tools I use every day.
Here’s where I stand at 50.
The polish that pulled me in
My first Apple product was an iPhone SE — the original, the small one. I remember the feeling of picking it up and thinking: everything just works. The animations were smooth. The typography was considered. Apps opened and closed without stuttering. Coming from years of Windows and Android devices, it felt like someone had actually cared about the details.
That polish is what made Apple different. Not the specs, not the price — the feeling that every interaction had been thought through. It’s what Steve Jobs obsessed over, and it’s what turned casual users into lifelong customers.
I still see flashes of it. But I also see more hiccups now than I used to. More bugs that ship. More features that feel rushed out the door. The company that once held a product back until it was right now patches things in x.1 and x.2 updates. That shift is real, and people notice.
From Microsoft MVP to Apple every day
When I started this blog, I was a Microsoft MVP writing about Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail, and cross-platform software. I covered the iPhone because it was interesting, not because I was in the Apple camp.
The switch wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was gradual. macOS became my daily operating system. The MacBook became my primary machine. The iPhone became the phone I stopped thinking about because it just did what I needed. Windows 11 still runs on my Mac, but it lives inside a VMware Fusion ARM64 virtual machine. It’s a guest in Apple’s house.
I didn’t choose Apple because of loyalty. I chose it because the daily experience was better. That’s the strongest compliment you can pay a platform — it won on the mundane stuff, the things you do a hundred times a day.
The breakthrough: Apple Silicon
If I had to point to one moment in Apple’s recent history that genuinely impressed me, it’s the M1 chip. I bought the M1 MacBook Pro the day it came out. I wanted to see if Apple’s claims were real or marketing.
They were real.
The machine was fast in a way Intel Macs never were. Not incrementally faster — categorically different. Silent. Cool to the touch. Battery life that lasted an actual workday instead of dying at 3pm. And the transition from Intel was smoother than anyone expected — Rosetta 2 ran x86 apps so well that most people couldn’t tell the difference.
Apple Silicon might be the most significant technical achievement in Apple’s history since the original Macintosh. The iPhone changed what a phone could be. Apple Silicon changed what a chip company could be. And they did it themselves: designed in-house, fabricated by TSMC, running an architecture that now scales from the $599 MacBook Neo all the way up to the Mac Pro. That range, from a phone chip in a laptop to a workstation, is extraordinary.
What Steve wouldn’t have shipped
Steve Jobs famously said: “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Apple now sells a $129 stylus. He was against touchscreens on laptops. Credible rumours say a touchscreen MacBook is coming by late 2026.
I don’t think these contradictions are necessarily wrong. The Apple Pencil is a good product. A touch-friendly Mac might work. Companies should evolve past their founders’ opinions. But there’s a difference between evolving and lowering the bar.
Liquid Glass is the clearest example. Apple redesigned the entire interface language of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS in 2025 — and then spent the 26.x minor updates refining what should have been finished before it shipped. Under Steve, that doesn’t happen. You don’t unveil a design language at WWDC and then spend the next year fixing it in public. You get it right first, or you delay it.
And then there’s Siri. Apple announced the AI-powered Siri at WWDC 2024. It was supposed to ship in early 2025. Then spring 2026. Now maybe 2027. Three years of promises with nothing to show for it. I wrote about this in February. Siri still can’t hold a conversation, and Apple is paying Google a billion dollars a year for Gemini because they couldn’t build their own language model in time.
Steve was many things, but he didn’t announce products he couldn’t ship. The gap between Apple’s promises and Apple’s delivery has grown wider than it should be.
When Steve died in 2011, I wrote on this blog: “Steve Jobs’ ideas have truly made me Think Different.” That’s still true. But thinking different used to mean shipping things nobody else would dare attempt — and getting them right. Lately it means announcing things nobody else would dare delay this long.
Leaks and the lost mystique
One more thing that’s changed: the surprise is gone. Apple keynotes used to be genuine reveals. Now, every product leaks weeks or months before the announcement. The MacBook Neo specs were public knowledge before Apple said a word. The foldable iPhone rumours have been circulating for years.
NDAs don’t work like they used to. Whether it’s supply chain leaks, developer betas, or intentional seeding, the result is the same. The moment of “one more thing” has been replaced by “we already saw this on X last Tuesday.” That’s a loss. The surprise was part of the magic.
Looking ahead
Apple at 50 is still the company I choose every day. I write on a MacBook. I carry an iPhone. I run macOS as my primary operating system. That hasn’t changed, and I don’t see it changing.
But the next decade matters.
The foldable iPhone rumours don’t excite me. I’ve seen the Android foldables. The crease is visible. The software compromises are real. I’m sure Apple will execute better than Samsung — they usually do — but I’m skeptical that folding glass is the next revolution. It feels like a form factor looking for a problem.
AI is a different story. It’s overhyped, yes. But it’s also unstoppable. I use Claude and ChatGPT every day for writing and development. The tools are genuinely useful, right now, today. If Apple can make Siri even half as capable as what I already use on the command line, that would be worth more than any hardware redesign. What I’m most looking forward to is a Siri that isn’t dumb. That’s a low bar, and Apple still hasn’t cleared it.
Fifty years
Apple at 50 is a company I admire. Not unconditionally. I’ve spent the last few months writing about their failures as much as their successes. But admiration doesn’t require perfection. It requires caring about the details, pushing boundaries, and having the courage to do things nobody else will try.
Apple still has all of that, somewhere. The M-series chips prove it. The ecosystem proves it. The $599 Mac that runs on a phone chip proves it.
I just want to see more of it — and less of the patches, the delays, and the leaks.
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the ones who still believe Apple can be what it was. Fifty years in, I’m still one of them.
Now ship the Siri update.
Think different.