Computing would be totally different had Apple not been formed 50 years ago, today

The Apple of 1976 is unrecognizable compared to today's gigantic corporation, and yet key early decisions by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and more, are still having their effect today, half a century later.

Apple has long had a reputation for never looking back, and it's usually justified. "Let's go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday," said Steve Jobs in an interview that has long been lost, but is forever quoted in motivational speeches.

He was consistent about this even when talking about himself and his work, though. "[Technology] is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries," he said in 1994, "or where one builds a church that will be looked at, admired, and looked at in astonishment for centuries."

Still, when the Mac was 30, or the company itself was 40, Apple did take a little moment to reflect. Then in February 2026, Tim Cook went further, and admitted that he and the company were conscious of Apple's half-century approaching.

"I've been unusually reflective lately about Apple because we have been working on what do we do to mark this moment," said Cook. "When you really stop and pause and think about the last 50 years, it makes your heart sing. It really does. I promise some celebration."

He delivered. On March 12, 2026, Apple announced a worldwide celebration, and Cook himself wrote an open letter about "50 years of Thinking Different."

Now the company's hugely successful CEO, Tim Cook has run Apple for longer than anyone else, including Steve Jobs. He's personally seen the company's last 28 years, but there were 22 before he even met Steve Jobs.

That was 1998 and Apple was heading into a resurgence with the return of Jobs. It had already had most of its growing pains, but it was yet to be the powerhouse company it would become.

Apple's three-act story

Today Apple is surely in the third act of its story. Back in the 1970s, it had its exciting first act, then it went through turmoil in the 1990s for its second, before ultimately becoming the textbook American success story. It was true — you can start a multinational, multi-trillion dollar company in a garage.

It's not as if starting a company at all had been the obvious move, though. In the mid 1970s, Steve Wozniak had designs for what became known as the Apple I computer, and his friend Steve Jobs had designs on selling them. Woz would've given them away to anyone interested, Jobs would not, and even so, even the much more commercially minded Steve Jobs did not set out to make a company.

Steve Wozniak holding an original Apple I motherboard he designed

Instead, what both of the Steves tried first was to sell their ideas to the existing firms that they either worked for at the time, or had previously been employed by. Woz was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, for instance, and he managed to get senior engineers to examine his design with a view to HP buying them.

Not only did they agree that it was workable, they also recognized that it could made cheaply — yet still they passed on it. Woz's ideas didn't fit with what they thought a Hewlett-Packard computer should be.

Steve Jobs's old firm Atari felt the same. He had attempted to get Atari interested in what would become the Apple II, but this too was rejected. Except that Atari's Al Alcorn put Jobs in touch with venture capitalists, and the road to forming a company was begun.

When they did formally found Apple, it was with another Atari engineer, Ron Wayne. He would famously design the original, immensely ornate Apple logo, and then he would even more famously leave the company before it took off. It's just that he left even faster than you might imagine.

The three men officially formed Apple on April 1, 1976, and Ron Wayne resigned 12 days later. He'd been offered ten percent of Apple, but chose instead to be bought out by Steve Jobs for $800.

In 2026, that's the equivalent of approximately $4,597. That sum would buy about 20 shares in Apple.

Wayne's payout would later be increased, though, as the far more experienced businessman Mark Markkula came on board in 1977 as an investor. Under Markkula, the Apple corporation officially bought out all three of the original partners, for a total of $5,308.96 ($28,629 in 2026). For legal reasons, Wayne got a third of that despite having already left.

Apple's original founders. L-R: Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Ron Wayne

It's impossible not to now see his leaving as a mistake, given Apple's overwhelming success. But at the time, he was paid reasonably and he was leaving a firm that had far from a certain future. Amongst the countless times he's been asked about his departure, Ron Wayne claimed in 2013 that he had no regrets at all.

"I count myself extremely fortunate to have been at a turning point in history," he said, "and the establishment of Apple was indeed a turning point in history, although at the time of course, nobody ever knows this."

In 2026, he admitted that he'd agreed to the original $800 just so he could leave, and then he practically forgot about it — for two months. "[Then] I got an envelope in the mail from Jobs, containing no letter, no note, no explanation, nothing, just a check for $800," he said.

"And to be candid I thought it was a tip," he continued. "And a cheap one at that."

Apple's first success

After Wayne left but before Markkula turned it into a grownup company, Apple did have its first success — and it was one that will seem familiar if you follow how the company works today. Apple made 50 Apple-I computers without having any money whatsoever, and it sold them all one day before having to pay its suppliers.

Today Apple has a supremely well-managed approach to its supply chain, but even in 1976 it was literally learning the benefits of finance. It was the first time Steve Jobs had ever heard of what is called 30 days net, meaning you had that long to pay your suppliers. He learned it then because he had to.

Jobs had pitched the Apple-I to Paul Terrell, who was running the then successful Byte Shop. While Jobs wanted to sell the motherboards and kits to have hobbyists make up their own computers, Terrell wanted assembled devices and he got them.

Mike Markkula (right) with Steve Jobs in the 1970s — image credit: allaboutstevejobs

Specifically, he wanted 50 and he would pay $500 for each one — after he got them. "Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected," Steve Wozniak told David Pogue for "Apple: The First 50 Years."

But the prospect of $25,000 didn't help when Woz and Jobs figured they'd need $15,000 to buy the components. Except because he could prove he had the purchase order from Terrell, Jobs was able to secure this net 30 days.

As long as Apple made all of those Apple I computers and delivered them on time, the two Steves would then get enough money to pay their suppliers.

If Apple learned then about finance and supply chains, it really learned about business in 1977 when ex-Intel Markkula came on board. He advised Steve Jobs on how to write a business plan and then, when Jobs kept not doing it, wrote the plan himself.

He wrote such a convincing plan that by the end of it, he decided to invest himself. More than putting in cash, though, Markkula did something else that is still part of Apple all these decades later.

He set down the company's philosophy.

It's probably part of Business 101 at Harvard that corporations need philosophies, and mission statements, and if you've ever worked for a corporation, you're likely to have a healthily skeptical attitude to them. Yet in Apple's case, the philosophy Markkula wrote was remarkably clear, and the company has stuck to it remarkably consistently.

This was Apple in 1977 - and it's still Apple today.

Steve Jobs would later explain to his biographer Walter Isaacson, that Markkula's point was that making money shouldn't be the goal. You obviously need to, and you even more obviously want to, but if money is the first thought, the company will struggle. Whereas if you make "something you believe in" and you also concentrate on "making a company that will last," the money will follow.

Markkula's "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" is so clearly an Apple idea because it is extremely and consciously simple. The one-page document, written on January 3, 1977, has only two short directives about understand customer needs, and focusing on a few specific products instead of spreading itself too thinly.

Then it concludes with a paragraph about conveying Apple to its customers.

People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

To this day, Apple is known for how well it presents its products, how carefully designed the packaging is. Today, that is still part of what makes Apple, Apple.

And it was there, written into the company, right from its very beginnings. Back then, it was a paragraph on a mission statement, but by the end of Steve Jobs' life, it was an entire "packaging room" where boxes were designed and tested.

In recent years, that focus on packaging is arguably even stronger — and more noticeable outside the company. For in 2021, a photography art collection was devoted solely to Apple packaging.

Then amongst all of its environmental efforts, the company announced in 2023 that it was working to remove all plastic packaging.

Lisa Jackson was Apple's best-known VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives

Today you can argue that Apple is able to design clever packaging because it has the money to do so. That's unquestionably true, and it is certainly the case that few other companies have the same kind of disposable income.

Yet it's more that Apple's aims in design have scaled up alongside its growing business. The company has always focused on details that others do — and the company has not always been awash with money.

The company has not even always been profitable, although for many years Woz's next creation, the Apple II, sold incredibly well. It would come to be the reason Apple survived its early years.

The Apple II also saw the very brief return of Ronald Wayne.

"Jobs asked me to design the enclosure for the Apple II," Wayne told Fast Company in March 2026. "He failed to tell me that they had come upon a stack of money, and I thought that they were, as I had met them, two kids without two nickels to rub together."

"So I came up with a design that required no tooling whatsoever," continued Wayne.

His case design had the monitor sitting on top, and the keyboard built into the chassis. It sounds like the Apple II — but it wasn't. Jobs ditched Wayne's designs and turned instead to industrial designer Jerry Manock.

At this point, the Apple II was faced with more competition from rival devices that were also aimed at general users instead of hobbyists. But the Apple II now came with BASIC in ROM, so it was always immediately available, rather than having to be loaded each time.

Then for the hobbyist market that Steve Jobs was against, the Apple II included slots for expansion cards.

The Apple II computer

The combination of this easy of use for non-technical buyers, and expandability for the technically-minded, made the Apple II a success.

It was such a success, and for such a long time, that Apple was able to weather the subsequent failures of the Apple III, the Apple Lisa — and the Macintosh.

The crucial 1980s and 1990s

Before Apple was ten years old, it launched the Macintosh and entirely failed to change the world — at least at first. Of course it shaped the future, there's little question that Windows wouldn't exist if the Mac hadn't come first.

Then, too, in 1984, the best-known computers were ones like the TRS-80, the Epson PX-8, the Compaq Deskpro, and countless others you've either forgotten or never heard of. Only the Macintosh is still being made and sold, although today's Mac Studio is admittedly staggeringly different to the original 128K Mac.

Back then, though, it didn't look as if the Mac was going to have any future, let alone such a successful one. Consequently, it began to look as if Apple might not have all that much longer to go, either.

The conflict between Jobs's desire for perfection at any cost, and then-CEO John Sculley's more sober focus, let to the most famous exit in US corporate history. Steve Jobs exited stage left, going to form NeXT.

Sculley stayed and while he's been maligned since, while he made some peculiar decisions and today looks like he took his eye off the ball, he did grow Apple's finances.

Or he did at first, he did for more than half of the ten years he worked there. But at the end, Apple was struggling again, and he had another exit stage left, if a much more profitable one.

Turning it around

Sculley was replaced by his Chief Operating Officer, Michael Spindler, who licensed the Mac out to other companies. The belief was that these clone Macs would grow the market, but instead they just ate into Apple's own sales, so Spindler was replaced by Gil Amelio.

What's become clear since those days is that Amelio profited from how Sculley had invested in Arm. That British processor design company is now a worldwide success, but maybe its biggest impact is from what Apple did when it sold off its shares.

Apple was in dire financial straits — Steve Jobs would later say it had been 90 days away from bankruptcy — but Amelio had this potential windfall. He spent it on buying NeXT for $429 million.

It led to Jobs ousting Amelio, taking control, and reworking the Mac in NeXT's image, promoting his teams over Apple's existing ones. That has all led to the recurring joke that in fact NeXT bought Apple — for minus $429 million.

Climbing out of the hole

There's little doubt that Jobs indulged in some quite petty steps once he was back as CEO. He killed off the Apple Newton, for instance, and for all that device's problems, it was an example of Apple's great design.

But then Apple was haemorrhaging money and its attempt to stem the bleeding by selling countless different computers had failed. Apple tried to make a computer for every different type of user with a checkbook, instead of making one computer for the rest of us.

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Jobs killed off countless devices like the Newton, and countless technology projects like OpenDoc. He was vilified for it by people who had devoted years of their lives to this work — but he was right.

He announced his now famous four-quadrant plan, saying that Apple would make a consumer desktop, a professional desktop, and alongside them pro and consumer laptops. And that was all.

It was a way of concentrating scarce resources, it was a way of making a bold statement that the company's employees could get behind. And one of those employees was Jony Ive.

Ive actually joined Apple to work on the Newton MessagePad, but rather than resenting Jobs killing that off, he instead found a friend. "Immediately there was a connection that was so special and so strong," he told BBC Radio in February 2025.

He confirms Jobs's story of Apple being broke, and also the story that it was the iMac that turned the company around. But in that 2025 interview, he also revealed that designing this company life-saving device took only three weeks.

That's just three weeks out of 50 years. But it was the start of the Apple we know today, as much as it was the saviour of the Apple back then.

How Apple does and doesn't change

It's a very different company in its 50th year. But Apple is still grounded in the firm that was created back in 1976, and that does apply to the design of its devices, it does apply to how many devices it makes.

Speaking to AppleInsider, author David Pogue said that he had asked every Apple interviewee specifically about how the company had changed. "The mission never changed," he said. "And, I might add, with insane focus."

Apple set out to make computers and never stopped, where firms like Samsung began in wildly different industries — and continue to operate across many of them.

But then Pogue also notes that "the Tim Cook era has introduced some values that were not there during the Steve Jobs era." Cook is behind Apple's concerns for the environment, for instance, and how the company contributes to disaster relief around the world.

Then, too, Tim Cook is far more of a political figure than Steve Jobs ever was. Although he denies that.

"What I do is I interact on policy, not politics, I'm not a political person, on either side, I'm not political," Cook said in 2026. "And so I'm kind of straight down the middle, and I focus on policy, and so I'm very pleased that the president and the administration is accessible to talk about policy."

Steve Jobs wasn't a stranger to the White House. In 1996 he told President Bill Clinton that he should hire alternative medicine proponent Dean Ornish as Surgeon General, but it didn't happen.

Steve Jobs (far left) with the crew of Pixar's "A Bug's Life" in the White House — image credit: Sharon Farmer and the White House

Cook has been vastly more successful, particularly at getting Trump to reduce tariffs that were affecting Apple. But that has brought him criticism, particularly when Cook was one of the first to present Trump with a made-up trophy.

Protecting the present

Right alongside Cook's protecting Apple from politics in the US, the company is facing unparalleled pressures from just about every country in the world. Its App Store, in particular, is subject to legal and regulatory issues that will continue for years to come.

Apple, too, will surely carry on, and it's doubtlessly already planning its 20th anniversary iPhone. But there are more years behind Tim Cook's long reign than there are still to come.

There will be another CEO, and another, and another. There will be criticism and immense legal pressures, but there will also be new devices.

Apple practically always sits out whatever is happening in technology, until such time as it can swoop in with devices and ideas that are deeply well thought out. It seems to now be doing that with Apple Intelligence, too, and it looks like it may again succeed because of this approach.

There is surely no part of Apple Intelligence that was imaginable back in 1976. But the very same approach that Jobs and Woz took to making the best computer they could, that's not changed at all.