A newly released video of an internal event from 1999 has Steve Jobs explaining why Microsoft would never have added Wi-Fi, and why Apple did.
As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, a video from nearly 30 years ago has surfaced. Released on YouTube by ex-Apple engineer Akira Nonaka, it shows Steve Jobs making a speech one week after the company's successful launch of the iBook.
This was Apple's first consumer laptop and it came as Apple was finally coming out of its long decline. Jobs talked about how the company had then had seven consecutive profitable quarters, and had made $200 million the year before.
Jobs did also talk about the various features of the iBook that he said had been so successful, but he really concentrated on Wi-Fi. Today that's so normal as to never be thought of, but in 1999, he said that everyone at the iBook launch had just lost their minds over how great it was.
AppleInsider can attest to that, too, as managing editor Mike Wuerthele was present at the launch.
It wasn't that Apple invented Wi-Fi, as Jobs said "this technology's been out there waiting to happen," but he argued only Apple would and could use it. The likes of Compaq and Dell would ignore it, he said, because "it's not an industry standard... plus it doesn't work with Windows."
Those manufacturers would expect Microsoft to add Wi-Fi support to Windows before they'd back it up in hardware, but Jobs says Microsoft wouldn't have done it either.
"You go talk to Microsoft," he said, "[and] they go well, it's not high volume. We've got 38 million things wrong with our software, we'll put it at the bottom of the list."
To huge applause, Jobs concluded his point by saying the reason Apple could and did add Wi-Fi was that "we're the last people in this business who give a shit about making great computers."
Setting out Apple's ambitions
Later on, Apple would often be accused of failing to support its professional users, and instead be concentrating on consumers. But on this hot Tuesday in July 1999, Jobs said Apple would not target Enterprise customers.
"That's not why Apple was put on this Earth," he said. "We're gonna go and sell the creative professionals who we love selling to, and they love us."
"We're gonna regain our leadership position and education," he continued. "Our market [research] shows [we're] still number one, but we're gonna start taking back market share that we lost over the last five years."
Why Jobs came back
When this video first came out, Steve Jobs had been back at Apple for just two years. He was still the "iCEO," the interim chief executive officer, and would remain so for another few months.
So he was still in the earliest days of returning and of working to turn the failing Apple around. Except he says in this video that this wasn't what he had been planning.
"But I never looked at it that way," he says in the video. "The reason I came here... isn't to turn Apple around, it's to make Apple great again. And now we have that possibility."
Based on the work everyone had been doing in those two years up to this point, Jobs said Apple now had "an incredible foundation to really do some awesome stuff in the next few years."
He told employees that what would be coming next from Apple was "unbelievable, the best stuff I've ever seen in my life." He will have meant the Apple Cinema Display, the next iMac, and the next Power Mac, that was launched just the month after this speech.
As a talk, this speech by Jobs is similar to his famous Fireside Chat with developers in 1997. He faced an adversarial crowd in that one, and only Apple employees in this, but in both he was candid about Apple's future.
But even he can't have been confident enough to predict the future. When he mentioned Apple having earned $200 million the previous year, he said "that's a lot of money."
In its most recent earnings call from January 2026, the company's revenue was $143.8 billion. That's 719 times more for a quarter in 2026 than the whole year in 1998.
But everything that got Apple to where it is now, was described by Steve Jobs in this video.
