According to the internet, Apple was founded on April 1st 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, which got me thinking about two things: what was I doing in April 1976, and how has Apple changed technology?
What Were We Doing In 1976?
Fifty years is a long time, so I had to cast my mind back. I was living in Buenos Aires (my first stint); the military junta had just taken power and computers, for me anyway, were lurking somewhere in the distant future. In fact, I kept a diary for that year – you know, one that requires pen and paper – and most of my flowery entries were about girls, parties and maths exams. But what I didn’t know was that two men began to cobble together rudimentary computers in a garage in San Francisco and the race for personal computers had begun.
How Has Apple Changed Technology?
According to Ben Wood of CCS Insight, a market research firm, the iPhone is the ‘Hotel California’ of smartphones, and once you have one, you’re ‘unlikely to leave’. Personally, I wouldn’t go that far because I’ve had two and couldn’t wait to get back to Android. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Apple products are beautiful to behold and attract brand loyalty like no other.
The 2001 iPod pretty much kicked off Apple’s mass market appeal, followed by the iPod Touch and iPhone in 2007. But it was the iPhone that sent the company on its way into the stratosphere, followed in 2015 by the Apple Watch, which itself has generated a staggering $15BN of revenue. Apple Inc. today has a market capitalisation of around $5 trillion – not bad for a company started in the garage of a leafy San Francisco suburb.
It’s A Family Affair
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had two iPhones – a used 3G back in 2010 and a used iPhone 7 in 2017. I got annoyed with the first one because its Bluetooth wouldn’t connect with a non-Apple device, and the second one because I had to jailbreak it just to get it the way I wanted. Even then, it got on my tits, so since then it’s been Samsung Galaxy all the way. On the other hand, my local in-laws are entirely Apple; my niece, my daughter, and their families are the same, and my brother has recently ditched Windows for a MacBook Pro because it harmonises with his and his wife’s iPhones and their entire Mac environment. None of these families will ever change, of that I am certain. And why should they? If everything works the way it should – unlike Windows, more often than not – why change?
Kudos to Tim Cook for taking up the baton following Steve Jobs’ death in 2015 and pushing the company to the most valuable in the world – new boss, John Ternus, certainly has his work cut out. As for me, I will continue to admire Apple products for their aesthetic beauty, but from a distance.
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