Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. It feels weird (and slightly wrong in this era) to be a fan of a company, but this is a company whose products have been my connection to professional activities, creative activities, and communications, and the world on a daily basis for nearly 30 years. Across multiple eras, Apple has maintained a spirit of creativity and a consistent belief that computers can support people in being more creative. Considering how different and larger the computer industry is in 2026 compared with 1976, that Apple is still making products that people feel passionate about is a huge accomplishment.

Whether or not Apple invented any technology, like the personal computer, WIMP interface, portable media player, smartphone, or any other technology, Apple focused more on making the technology accessible as a fully-formed product than any other competitor. Which is why Apple is still making computers today, while IBM sold off its PC division 20 years ago.

Over its history, Apple has usually held itself to a higher standard of quality than the rest of the computer industry. Even in Apple’s malaise era in the late 90’s, Mac OS maintained a refinement that Windows 95 and 98 never had, even though the Wintel PCs were generally faster and more capable. While other companies might release a version 1.0 that was rough around the edges, Apple would typically hold off until what other companies would ship as version 3.1.

I used Apple IIe at elementary school, IIc and IIgs with my friends, but mostly learned computers on IBM PCs at home. Eventually, my parents added a Macintosh II and that opened my mind to what computers could be. The smooth graphics, polyphonic sound, and directly manipulating files in the GUI were so much more advanced than a 286 PC with CGA graphics running MS-DOS. In middle school, we had a computer lab with Macintosh LC computers and the most memorable project from that time was the Hypercard stack I built about plate tectonics. When I was in high school, one of my first jobs was helping with maintaining and networking Mac computers for our elementary school.

Apple has always been at war with itself over how open or closed to make products. The Apple II started with a balance of being a complete product that could be expanded. The Macintosh started as a single closed product and later added expansion. And when they did add the expansion capability, the early modular Macs simplified the process compared with the PCs of the time. And Apple found unique balances between complete products and expandable ones. The SE/30 remains a favorite of the old-school heads in the know, because it represented the most complete balance of both. It maintained the luggable all-in-one design of the original Macintosh, but supported internal hard drive and floppy drive and could drive a large external color display, and packed the same leading-edge 68030 processor as the Macintosh IIx. When I took a Music Technology class in high school, and the lab also had faster 68040 and PowerPC all-in-ones with color displays, I gravitated towards the one SE/30, with the black and white display, it still felt faster than the newer Macs.

Today’s Apple Silicon Macs work so well because Apple controls nearly the entire stack of technologies, from the CPU to the hardware design to the operating system and backend services. Where Apple struggles, it is because its products are designed to work in a specific way and do not consider the other software and services that users want to use.

Apple has always been forward-looking. While Microsoft has prioritized backwards-compatibility so that tis enterprise customers can adopt change at their own pace, Apple has never been afraid to push forward. In some cases, like the iMac dropping legacy ports and floppy drives, that pushed the whole computer industry forward at once. It didn’t try to protect its most successful iPod products, but instead created new products. iPod was a great business, but iPhone is a far better business. If you don’t try to push yourself forward, competitors will.

At the same time, Apple has pushed forward because of competition. While the 90’s were the low point for Apple, they would not have bounced back if not for the competition – and collaboration – with Microsoft. But in areas where the product is not fundamental to the company’s bottom line and Apple does not have great competitors, it does not produce great products. In the connected-TV box space, the company flounders. tvOS on AppleTV (the device) is the only decent streaming platform. The AppleTV software is responsive, videos stream smoothly, and the interface feels less slow and complicated to use than all of the other devices. Google TV is not terrible, but it doesn’t challenge tvOS in the same way that Android and Pixel challenge iOS and iPhone.

Since Jobs' return to the company and continuing into the Cook era, Apple has focused on building more and more of its core technology in-house. Instead of relying on Motorola or Intel for CPUs, it now designs its own class-leading processors and is taking more and more of its technology in-house to build complete products.

As a company, Apple has had some of the most lasting impacts on the state of the world. USB is a ubiquitous standard thanks to the Bondi blue iMac. Every electronic and household gadget in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was wrapped in colorful translucent plastic. During the iPod era, everyone used white earbuds. Apple managed to offshore its entire manufacturing supply chain without compromising on quality. Thanks to Apple’s investment and scale, it has been a key driver for concentrating tech manufacturing to China.

Thanks to the success of iPhone and it becoming the template for the modern internet communicator media player phone, most everyone in the world has an internet-connected camera with them most of the time. As we are seeing, this is an important check on authoritarian storytelling. Enabling easy and high quality photography and videography of events and making it possible to share those instantly helps connect the world and support truth and transparency. And yet, these same devices are the primary small windows into social networks that are afflicting too many people with brain rot and hyper-polarization.

The App Store and services revenue are addicting Apple to extracting distribution fees from developers and services, at the cost of providing the best platform for its developers and users.

David Pogue, Apple: The First 50 Years Computer History Museum: Apple@50 The Verge Apple @ 50

In 50 years, Apple has had a lot of great products and some notable failures (Apple III, Centris, Newton), The Verge’s list of 50 best and/or most important Apple products is largely correct. But, there are four edits that I would make:

1. iMac G5 -> Macintosh IIfx In the pre-PowerPC classic Mac era, the IIfx was the ultimate expression of the first modular Mac lineup. The Verge excludes any of the Macintosh II line. I may have more affection for this era, since it was how I was introduced to Macintosh, but it was the first foray of Macintosh into supporting color displays and the ability to meaningfully expand, with support for expansion cards and multiple monitors. The IIfx pushed this design to the limit. The iMac G5 was impressive that it was able to take the powerful and power-hungry G5 processor and fit it into a flat-panel all-in-one computer. But it was less elegant than its predecessor, the sublimely well-designed iMac G4.

2. Original iPad -> iPhone mini (12/13) As a person who prefers small phones in an era of phones getting larger and larger, the iPhone 12 mini was a welcome embrace of the small phone. It offered all of the same capabilities of the larger iPhone 12 in exchange for things on screen appearing slightly smaller and a shorter battery life. At the time, there was nothing else like the iPhone mini on the market. Today, there is nothing The people who love the iPhone mini LOVE the iPhone mini. The iPad arrived largely fully-formed. Fifteen years later, despite massive improvements in hardware capabilities, it is still largely the same product. But the iPad really established itself with the iPad 2, which was thinner and lighter and the best expression of the original iPad design. (As someone who had the retina iPad 3, it was heavier and didn’t quite have enough power to draw that many pixels. The iPad 2 was the better product).

3. Powerbook 500 series -> 12" Powerbook G4 The 12" Powerbook G4 was an incredibly impressive computer for its time. It took all of the power of the 15" Powerbook and shrank it down to the width of the keyboard. Its aluminum case was slightly smaller than the 12" iBook and it felt more put together and coherent than the plastic iBook. The Powerbook 500 series was the first Powerbook to have a trackpad instead of a trackball, and it wasn’t anything like today’s trackpads. It was far better than the follow-up 5300 series, which had some problems with fire, but not as groundbreaking as the 100-series Powerbooks and not as good as the G3 Powerbooks.

4. Slim unibody iMac -> iMac with Retina Display This is a subtle change, but the Retina Display may be the best quality of life improvement that Apple has brought to computing in the 21st century. Once Apple launched the iPhone 4 which rendered text and graphics in quadruple-resolution for higher fidelity, that represented one of the biggest leaps in the ability to work with text on screens since the original Mac brought WSYWIG editing to personal computers. The all-in-one iMac was able to bring this to desktop well ahead of standalone desktop retina-class displays. Only recently has it become possible to find reasonably priced 5K 27" displays.

And as much as I would like to find a way to fit the Watch Ultra into this list, I can’t justify it knocking off any of these other ones. In many ways, the G4 Cube was the model for today’s small and quiet modern Mac mini and Mac Studio, but it was decidedly not a success. Depending on the day, I might argue that Patel and Pierce selected the wrong Mac mini (M4) or iPod nano (2nd generation), but overall, it’s a fair assessment.

As far as ranking, I think there are a clear top 5:

1. Mac OS X - this is the foundation of Macs, iPhone, iPad, Apple watch, Apple TV and more for the last 25 years. From Aqua to Liquid Glass, it continues to prove reliable and elegant.
2. iPhone (2007) - Without considering how important the iPhone line is to the company now, the original iPhone was such a leap beyond the other smartphones at the time. It was magical.
3. Macintosh (1984) - Through 3 CPU platform changes and an evolution to a modern OS with OS X, the Mac is still trying to be a powerful, easy to use computer.
4. M1 chip - With a computer, making the whole widget includes the processors, and Apple’s shift to its own ARM-based processors has made them significantly better products.
5. Bondi blue iMac - this kicked off the Jobs/Ive era by showing that Macs would be both fun, simple, and good at being computers. The all-in-one iMac used the same PowerPC G3 processors as the larger, beiger PowerMac G3 and was not only simple, but it was fast, and a great value. Malaise-era Apple tried to protect its high-end products by finding ways to slow and devalue lower-priced products. The iMac showed that Apple could compete on design, price, and performance all at once. This is the product that enabled Apple to undertake the transformation from the Malaise era into the Jobs/Ive renaissance.

And a handful of key products that I would rank as the top of their respective categories:

• Apple II/e - the best expression of the Apple II line. While the later IIgs brought more modern multimedia support and some GUI ideas from the Mac, it wasn’t the right computer at the right time like the II/e.
• Macintosh SE/30 - This was the best expression of the compact Mac form factor and just an absolute beast of a computer for the time.
• iMac G4 - Might be the best designed computer that Apple has ever made.
• Wedge Macbook Air - This is the template for all modern laptops
• iPhone 4 (A4) - Not only was this the first Apple device with the high-resolution Retina Display, but it was also the first iPhone with an Apple Silicon processor, the A4.
• iPod with click wheel (4th Gen) - the best, purest version of the iPod. I had the third-generation with the awkward horizontal command buttons and should have waited for the click wheel one.
• iPad 2 - This was where the iPad came into its own. iPad 2 was smaller and thinner than both the first iPad and the fatter and hotter iPad 3 with Retina Display.
• Extended Keyboard II - Every keyboard nerd is still chasing the smooth but tactile feel of the Apple Extended Keyboard II. Despite its giant surface area, this may have been the best-feeling computer keyboard of all time.

The Song of Ice and Fire books are so compelling because of how they show how myth are borne from history, which history is a story written by the victors. As readers learn more details about that history, it unpeels those details and complexity of the various players' motivations like an onion. That onion, was slowly roasted over a spit in with a goose so that the fat dripped on the onion while cooking. When paired with a hearty black bread and refreshing pint of ale.

Aside from unnecessarily detailed interludes about food (and a willingness to sprawl the scope of story), A Song of Ice and Fire is keenly aware that the powerful generally treat the powerless with little regard. With Game of Thrones, the politics and conflicts of the powerful were the focus of the storytelling.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the HBO adaptation of the Tales of Dunk and Egg, may be the most effective adaption yet from this world. Unlike Game of Thrones, where the scale and scope do make it feel epic, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is compact. But within this frame, it effectively highlights two of the biggest fundamental truths, that the powerless are often trampled by the powerful, and pre-modern times were not pleasant.

The focus on a single storyline allowed A Kinght of the Seven Kingdoms to show this world without the need to introduce as much plot and the storytelling benefitted from that.

This piece by Sam Henri Gold captures the excitement and enthusiasm that so many of us felt when learning to use computers in simpler times: “This Is Not The Computer For You”: “Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. "

General purpose computers are great because they give users the freedom to dig deeper and discover more. Having the ability to explore and figure out how to do things is the best way to learn for many. Being able to take the time to learn and figure out how these systems work and use them to do creative, interesting, fun, and/or useful things is what brought me and many others to computers.

Today, where too many people are spending too much time listening to loud idiots or yelling at others through our magic communication computers, perhaps we should all spend more time slowly figuring out to do things on a slightly outdated, but perfectly functioning, general purpose computer.

The industry continues to push forward significant developments and improvements in processing power. The MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro performs very comparably to the 5-year old M1 in the MacBook Air, which is still a highly useful computer. But even if the A18 Pro is slower than the M4, given the choice between an iPad with M4 and a keyboard case and the MacBook Neo, the MacBook Neo would be far more useful. macOS continues to be so much more powerful and useful than iPadOS. I do use an iPad Pro as a secondary computer every day. But doing any kind of real work (which for me is primarily interacting with web apps and working with Office files) on iPad feels like using a cork fork. A totally useful Mac laptop at an accessible price is exciting. But even with Macbook Neo offering so much performance at a great value, I will be surprised if the Macintosh ever shakes the popular perception of being expensive and overpriced.

With Ring’s launch of Search Party and the weather finally warming up beyond brutally cold in NJ, I replaced my Ring doorbell. As 404 Media has reported, Ring is more interested in creating a surveillance panopticon to create some vaguely defined version of neighborhood safety. But that means that individual Ring owners do not have control over their videos. With the launch of Search Party, which serves the good purpose of helping find lost pets, users were automatically added in, rather than having to agree to opt in. 404 Media reports that this is how Ring expects to launch more features. 404 Media: Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs

Trying to stay as much as possible within the Apple HomeKit ecosystem, I went with a Logitech Circle View doorbell, which stores its videos in HomeKit Secure Video. It also does not require its own subscription fee. HomeKit Secure Video does require an iCloud+ subscription from Apple. The Ring installation was slightly easier, using wire nuts and screw connectors, while the Circle View requires jamming the wires from the doorbell directly into the back of the mount. And one of the wires didn’t not want to stay seated within the doorbell, so it took me a few tries to successfully install. Unlike Ring, the Logitech chime integration required more wiring. The Circle view has a narrower field of view, but both capture high-quality video. Ring does capture time-lapse stills throughout the day, while the Home app only records motion by default. Apple Home does offer face recognition in a privacy forward way. The recognition is done locally on device (on whichever Apple TV or HomePod is serving as the Home hub) using the identifications that you have added into your personal photos library.

The Circle View does not offer fully local recording to a memory card, just to iCloud. It also only works with Apple devices, and doesn’t have an Android app. Other options to consider beyond Ring include the Aqara G410, which works with HomeKit Secure Video, has local storage, and offers an Android app. However, the G410 does not support a standard chime. For Google Home partisans, the Nest Doorbell is an option.