Opening thoughts. There is something almost too neat about the founding story we are all very familiar with—a garage in Los Altos, hand-lettered partnership agreement, and the date that reads like a joke. April Fools’ Day, 1976. Steve Jobs, 21. Steve Wozniak, 25. And 40-year-old Ronald Wayne—the reluctant elder who drew the original logo and sold his 10% stake soon after for $800. Three protagonists set in motion a series of events that undoubtedly still define the technology we use 50 years later.
EDITOR’S CORNER | Apple @ 50
Apple’s way of working has always retained shades of how things began. Not in a flash of corporate strategy decided in a boardroom, no million-dollar funding to start off with, but an irrepressible enthusiasm of people who found computers beautiful and couldn’t understand why no one else had made them feel that way. Two college dropouts and an adult voice in the room began a hobbyist’s dream that would fundamentally retool technology for humans. The three complemented each other.
Wozniak was the engineering genius. The Apple I (also called Apple-1, no relation to the Apple One services subscription) designed by Woz was a masterpiece of elegant design that the industry barely noticed. Jobs was something else. A force of will that turned Wozniak’s brilliance into product, that product into narrative, and in the years after, that narrative into something close to a religion.
Wayne understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone, just how volatile a room it was going to be. That is perhaps the reason he didn’t hang around for too long, though Wozniak has often said that Wayne left after a few months, contrary to a belief that the exit was much sooner. Wayne would later call it the right decision. History has been less certain.
This April marks the 50 year milestone for Apple. In that time, Apple has succeeded, failed, and then built, brick-by-brick, a seemingly unshakable an unattainable fortress for itself. A walled garden, if you may. When Tim Cook took over in 2011, sceptics doubted Apple could innovate without Jobs.
“Thinking different has always been at the heart of Apple,” Cook says in a letter to mark the milestone. Cook’s leadership style was a pivot, to operational brilliance. He didn’t just build products; he built an impenetrable ecosystem in a tough landscape.
“Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us — that the world is moved forward by people who think different. That’s because progress always begins with someone—an inventor or scientist, a student or storyteller—who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start,” Cook says.
Apple @ 50 — An HT Special Coverage
- A garage startup to a cult, from turbulence to dominance: Under Tim Cook’s leadership, as Apple races towards the 100 year milestone, there are clear signs of brave experimentation. Read more.
- Tim Cook, a magician and the art of stewardship: Apple under Tim Cook built something that Steve Jobs, for all his visionary ferocity, never quite managed—a recurring revenue engine of breathtaking elegance. Read more.
- A billion dollar shopping list to buy small, buy smart: Over the years, Apple’s intent to acquire small teams for talent has paid off, more often than not. Read more.
- An empire’s arc, and a fast blooming services orchard: Having successfully established that its customers would pay, Apple has systematically built the subscription levers for consistent revenue. Read more.
- PC makers were simply not ready for the MacBook Neo: HT’s benchmark tests peg the A18 Pro chip’s single core in range of the M4 chip, and faster than Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra X9 388H chip. Read more.
- An AI strategy underlined by patience, and a right time to strike: Any criticism Apple faced in the past couple of years around AI, is borne from a central misreading of Apple’s competitive psychology. Read more.
…but what about Apple @ 100?
The question is, where to from here? As Apple looks toward 2076, it is pivoting towards a destination that’s all about “the intelligence in your environment”.
- Spatial Computing: The Vision Pro is an attempt to make physical screens obsolete. It’s an ambitious, expensive gamble on a future where we interact with “digital twins” of our reality. Watching F1 in mixed reality, must be quite something. We’ll get there, sooner rather than later…that is once the perfect alignment between broad utility and a smidgen more pricing affordability is found.
- Proactive AI: With Apple Intelligence, Apple is trying to win the AI war not by making frontier models and obsessing over parameter numbers, but by making AI personal, contextual, and private. The Google partnership for Gemini to underline Siri and many more things AI on iPhone and iOS, is a step in that direction.
- Health: This has been a key focus area, and that’s unlikely to change in the next decade. By turning the popular Apple Watch into a medical-grade diagnostic tools, the company aims to make a health hub. The AirPods will be next, with an integrated heart rate sensor just the beginning. And we keep hearing rumours about a home hub-esque sort of a device—that could be key to putting everything (health and activity data, room’s temperature information and more) in context.
SECOND THOUGHTS | iPhone Air
A rather unlikely source, but it is good to have this data. I know that the Apple iPhone Air is a popular phone, but it was a bit of a wait to get some concrete context before we have this conversation. According to data from Ookla, a network intelligence and connectivity insights platform, the iPhone Air is twice as popular as the phone it replaced, the iPhone 16 Plus.
Their data comes from Speedtest Intelligence samples for Q4 2025, and Ookla charts this in terms of its relative share within the iPhone 17 portfolio. Most popular in Korea, making up 11.2% of all iPhone 17 series samples on the network, followed by Japan (8.9%), Sweden (8.6%), Singapore (8.4%) and Italy (7.7%). In India, the iPhone Air makes for 4.5% of the sample footprint, while it’s 6.8% in the US (the iPhone 16 Plus peaked at 2.9% sample share) and 6.5% in the UK. Clearly, the ultra-slim design has found traction with iPhone upgraders who wanted something different, something that stood out in the broader portfolio.
Apple did place the iPhone 17 Plus difficult position within the portfolio, as a large screen non-Pro option which wasn’t exactly inexpensive, yet it lacked the premium features of the similar screen sized ‘Pro Max’ iPhones. The iPhone Air has proved to be a strategic pivot in more ways than one—a flex that ultra-slim designs can be done successfully, that consumers want something fresh, and a completely different iPhone proposition to choose from.
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