On April 1, 1976, two college dropouts named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded a small company in Silicon Valley with an idea that, at the time, sounded almost comically ambitious — that ordinary people might one day want to own a computer. Fifty years later, Apple is one of the most valuable and recognizable companies on the planet. Here are the 8 milestones that got it there.
The milestones that defined 5 decades
1. Apple II (1977). Before Apple, personal computers were sold in kit form, assembled by hobbyists and housed in drab metal boxes. The Apple II changed that entirely. Launched in June 1977, it introduced color graphics, a satisfying keyboard and a moulded plastic case designed to look as good as it functioned. Even its beige color felt deliberate and fresh. It was the first computer that looked like it belonged in a home.
2. The mouse (1979). A visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto research labs proved to be one of the most consequential field trips in technology history. Jobs saw researchers working with graphical interfaces operated by a small hand-held device originally developed by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford. He immediately understood what it meant and brought the concept back to Apple, forever changing how humans interact with computers.
3. Macintosh (1984). The original Mac did away with the need for obscure typed commands and replaced them with an interface that felt instinctively learnable. Its January 1984 launch also introduced something that barely existed before — the modern product reveal as cultural event, complete with a cinematic Super Bowl advertisement directed by Ridley Scott and a theatrical unveiling before a 1,500-seat audience.
4. Pixar (1986). After being forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs purchased a small animation division from George Lucas and rebranded it as Pixar. What followed was the first fully computer-animated feature film in history — Toy Story, released in 1995 — and the birth of one of the most influential studios the entertainment world has ever seen.
5. iMac (1998). Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 to find a company described as two months from bankruptcy. His response was to reconnect with design, forge a partnership with a young British designer named Jony Ive, and release the candy-colored translucent iMac — a machine that was as visually striking as anything Apple had ever made and that set the template for the design-obsessed company it would become.
6. iPod (2001). The iPod distilled a simple and irresistible proposition: 1,000 songs in your pocket, navigated by an elegantly engineered click wheel. It also introduced iTunes, which quietly laid the infrastructure for digital media distribution and eventually gave rise to podcasting as a medium.
7. iPhone (2007). When Jobs unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007, most industry observers predicted it would fail. The price was too high, the critics said. The market was too crowded. Instead, 1.4 million units sold by the end of that year alone, with more than 3 billion sold in the decades that followed. The iPhone did not just succeed — it redefined what a computer could be and opened the door to the age of social media.
8. App Store (2008). Launched on July 10, 2008, the App Store solved one of the thorniest problems in software distribution by combining strong encryption with a centralized marketplace, effectively eliminating piracy while making it possible for any developer anywhere to reach a global audience. The phrase it inspired — “there’s an app for that” — became shorthand for an entire shift in how people approach problems.
Source: Dr. Nick Dalton on Silicon Republic, via The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0).