Apple at 50

There's something almost too on-the-nose about a company founded on April Fools' Day becoming the most valuable corporation on earth. But that's Apple. Fifty years ago this week, two Steves with bad haircuts and a garage in suburban California started soldering together circuit boards, flogging them for $666.66 a pop, and accidentally launched a revolution that put a supercomputer in your back pocket and turned your nan into a podcaster.

Apple at 50 is an incredible beast. The outfit that Jobs, Wozniak and the largely forgotten Ronald Wayne cobbled together in Los Altos now has two billion active devices worldwide. Your Apple II could do spreadsheets. Your iPhone can edit a feature film, track your heart rate and order you a kebab at 2am, sometimes simultaneously.

The milestone moments read like chapters from a particularly ambitious novel. The Macintosh in 1984. The near-death spiral when Jobs was out and Apple was making beige boxes nobody wanted. The resurrection: the iMac in Bondi Blue, the iPod, and the slow build towards the iPhone, which didn't just disrupt the phone industry in 2007 but consumed it whole. Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola, all reduced to footnotes.

The celebrations this month have been suitably grandiose. Alicia Keys kicked things off in New York. Sydney lit up the Opera House sails with iPad artwork. London got Mumford and Sons and Nia Archives at Battersea Power Station, the Apple logo projected across those iconic chimneys on the Thames. But it's the rumoured grand finale that has people talking. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman teased that the headliner at Apple's private bash at Apple Park is "still going strong" and part of the "British Invasion." The internet did the maths and landed on one name: Paul McCartney.

Which would be poetic. Jobs was a Beatles obsessive. He played "I Should Have Known Better" at iPod launches, cued up "Lovely Rita" when unveiling the iPhone, and spent decades locked in a trademark war with the Beatles' own Apple Corps that cost half a billion to settle. When the catalogue finally landed on iTunes in 2010, Jobs called it "a long and winding road." Having Macca close out the 50th would be the kind of full-circle moment Jobs would have adored.

The Jobs mythology still looms large. He's been gone nearly fifteen years, but Cook's Apple still trades heavily on his ghost. And at 65, Cook is fighting off rumours he's heading for the exit. Bloomberg and the Financial Times have both reported Apple is preparing for a transition, with hardware chief John Ternus tipped as heir apparent. Cook went on Good Morning America to bat the speculation away, insisting he "can't imagine life without Apple." Prediction markets, with all the subtlety of a bloke at the bookies, give it a one-in-three chance he's gone before 2027.

Then there's artificial intelligence. While OpenAI, Google and Meta have thrown hundreds of billions at data centres and language models, Apple has looked like the kid who forgot to revise. Apple Intelligence was announced in 2024, promising a Siri finally worth talking to. Two years on, that overhaul is still arriving in instalments. Their solution? Pay Google a billion a year to white-label Gemini under Siri's hood and open the door to ChatGPT and Claude so users can pick their poison. For a brand built on doing everything in-house, that stings.

But Apple's bet is that AI models will become commodities, and the real value lies in who controls the device they run on. Apple controls two billion of them. If the spending spree turns out to be an overbuilt bubble, their restraint could end up looking like the smartest play in tech.

Writing off Apple has always been a mug's game. They've been left for dead before and come back swinging every time. Fifty years on from that garage, the punchline to the April Fools' joke is clear: it was on the rest of us all along.