Fifty years ago, on April 1, 1976, a date that sounds more like a punchline than a beginning, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, better known as Woz, started something in a California garage. They called it Apple Computer. The world has looked a little different ever since.
Apple turned 50 yesterday, and for those of us who’ve watched its story unfold, it was hard not to feel a bit nostalgic. And why not? From flirting with bankruptcy in the late 1990s to becoming the world's most valuable public company, Apple’s half-century is one of the most improbable stories in American business. While everyone else was building machines, Apple was building a culture.
My dad, Tony, brought home a Macintosh Plus in the late 1980s. At the time, I wasn’t especially impressed. Most of my friends were using their home computers to play Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. The Mac wasn’t exactly a gaming machine, but it did have The Print Shop. Suddenly, I was producing banners of epic, perforated-paper length for any and all occasions.
Looking back, that little machine was teaching me something important, even when I was too annoyed to notice: computers didn’t have to be purely functional. They could be creative. They could be expressive. That was always the idea.
My dad understood that earlier than most. And the industry he worked in was about to feel it in a big way. Before the Mac, the advertising industry ran on craft in the most physical sense of the word. Headlines were set by typesetters. Layouts were drawn by hand, cut with X-Acto knives, and pasted onto boards. A single comp could take days. Changes often meant starting over.
The Macintosh reshaped everything, and it did so with startling speed. PageMaker arrived in 1985, followed by Adobe Illustrator and eventually Photoshop. The tools that had lived in the hands of specialists moved to the desktop. The comp that took three days could now take three hours. The idea that existed only in a creative director’s head could be on screen before the meeting ended. That kind of rapid shift feels familiar even today, as agencies adapt to new technologies and ways of working.
This was not a small thing. It fundamentally restructured how agencies were staffed, how work was priced, and how fast the creative process could move. It also democratized the craft in ways that were sometimes uncomfortable for the old guard. Effects that once required a professional darkroom could now be approximated on a desktop. Typefaces that once required a trip to the typesetter could be pulled from a menu. The distance between thinking and making got shorter. And that changed everything.
Apple’s own advertising reflected that same belief. It didn’t just sell products. It expanded what advertising could be. The “1984” spot wasn’t a demo. It was a statement. “Think Different” didn’t explain features, it aligned the brand with a certain kind of person. The work coming out of TBWA\Chiat\Day became something the rest of the industry studied closely, not just for what it said, but for how it said it.
Then came the iMac. Bright, unapologetic color in a world of beige boxes. The message wasn’t about gigahertz or RAM. It was about joy. The iPod silhouette campaign followed, with those dancing figures against electric backgrounds and white earbuds glowing, pure pop art masquerading as product advertising.
Music ran through all of it. The iPod ads pulsed with it. The product launches were scored like concerts. Apple understood intuitively that the emotional register of a song could do what a spec sheet never could, and it used that understanding better than anyone in the business.
Then came the iPhone, and everything changed again. It didn’t just replace the cell phone. It replaced the camera, the map, the newspaper, the record store, the photo album, and the boarding pass. It put a computer more powerful than anything my dad’s generation could have imagined into the hands of nearly everyone. It reorganized the way we work, shop, navigate, communicate, and yes, the way advertising reaches people, all around a single device that fits in your pocket. No product in the history of consumer technology has touched more lives more completely. And it came in a beautiful aluminum rectangle with not a single unnecessary thing about it.
My dad wrote about Steve Jobs after he died in 2011, and I’ve thought about that piece often since. He talked about productivity and the tools Apple gave people to do their work. But what he kept coming back to was something harder to define. He said Apple gave him hope.
Hope that the world could be more orderly, more thoughtful, more beautiful. That the things we use every day don’t have to be inelegant just because they’re useful. That function and form aren’t opposing forces. They’re the same thing. And when one is missing, something important is lost. That idea might be Apple’s most lasting contribution. Fifty years in, it still feels relevant.
Apple marked its anniversary by updating its homepage with a simple animation tracing its most iconic creations, the original Mac, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the Watch, the Vision Pro, rendered in a sketch style, as if being drawn by hand for the first time. As if someone is still sitting in a garage somewhere, dreaming it all up from scratch. My dad would have loved that.
