Apple at 50: Let's remember some computers

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.