Apple at 50: Still ripe!

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April 1, 1976: Apple $AAPL is incorporated. It’s April Fool's Day, of course — which is either the universe trolling fanboys or the most accurate founding date in corporate history. The joke is that everyone keeps falling for the same trick: declaring Apple dead, only to watch it… not be dead.

The company has now spent half a century accumulating obituaries and outlasting them, while the list of people who have confidently predicted Apple's demise is long, tacky with top-shelf credentials, and yet still plain wrong. Think: Wall Street analysts, tech journalists, Bill Gates (sort of), and a succession of its own CEOs, including Jobs himself, who once said Apple was “90 days from bankruptcy” — a situation he inherited when, after some years in the wilderness, he regained the post in ‘97. Since then, Apple has become the first company to hit $1 trillion in market capitalization, then $2 trillion, then $3 trillion, manufacturing a level of customer devotion that actual cults envy and behavioral economists actually, definitely study.

Siri, what’s Apple’s next “rumors of my death” chapter? Probably the company’s stumbling entrance into the AI era. But don’t get too comfortable, because betting against the comeback has never worked yet.

By the digits

0: Times that Apple has filed for bankruptcy, despite the news repeatedly rumored to be imminent.

$800: Amount paid to Ronald Wayne, Apple's forgotten third co-founder, when he sold his 10% stake back to Jobs and Wozniak in 1976, worried about potential debts. His share would be worth roughly $300 billion today. Let’s not rub it in.

90: Number of days Apple was from bankruptcy when Jobs returned in 1997, according to him. In response, he cut the product line from 350 items to 10, laid off thousands, and launched the iMac.

12: Years that Jobs spent away from Apple after being ousted in a 1985 boardroom coup, before returning via Apple's acquisition of his company, NeXT, for $427 million.

2.5 billion: Current approximate number of active Apple devices worldwide, per the company — or one for every three humans on Earth.

Fool me 50 times? Shame on me

Sure, Apple’s AI stumble is real. And Siri is, genuinely, annoying — a headache Apple created for itself by spending years promising an intelligent assistant and instead delivering one that struggles to set a timer without offering to call your grandmother, and eavesdrops just as uselessly on your conversations, interrupting that thing you’re telling your kid by announcing “okay, I’m searching for flyswatters.” Apple Intelligence, meanwhile, suffered a rolling series of delays and quiet retreats.

The market has noticed, as markets do. Apple has spent recent months trading below its 52-week highs, and analysts have cycled through familiar concerns about China, iPhone upgrade fatigue, tariffs, whether Cook has the vision and/or the charisma, and who’s next in the chair.

And yet. Apple sits on some $150 billion in cash and equivalents. It has 2.5 billion devices out in the world and an ecosystem its customers treat less like a product line than a lifestyle choice they’ll never give up. Its services business — App Store, iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Pay — is growing faster than its hardware. Add to that how it has 50 years of practice at looking finished before it isn't. Plus Pluribus.

The most impressive number of all? Probably the stock returns since the IPO. Read 'em and weep. If you bought the stock on the day it started trading, you'd have got in at $22 a share — or $0.10 on a split-adjusted basis, after five splits over the decades. Nowadays Apple trades around $245, for a return of approximately 244,900%. So, joke’s on us.

Quotable

“Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.” 

—Steve Jobs, during his now-famous Stanford commencement address in 2005

Brief history

1976: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne incorporate Apple Computer on April 1 in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, California. Wayne exits almost immediately. The Apple I, a bare circuit board, retails for $666.66, apparently because Wozniak liked repeating digits.

1984: Apple airs "1984," the Ridley Scott-directed Super Bowl ad introducing the Macintosh. The Mac is a hit, before losing ground to cheaper PCs, but the ad is still studied in college marketing classes.

1985: Jobs is pushed out by CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs himself recruited from Pepsi by asking, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?” The answer, it turned out, is yeah, kind of.

1996: After years of failed products (the Newton, the Pippin), Apple acquires Jobs' company NeXT. Jobs returns. Microsoft $MSFT invests $150 million. The turnaround begins.

2001: The iPod launches. It’s not a computer. That’s the point.

2007 and beyond: Jobs announces the iPhone, describing it as three products — “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” — that are actually one. The iPhone has since become the most successful consumer product in history. Just four years after the launch, Jobs dies, and Tim Cook succeeds him. He’s still CEO, and now the company is worth nearly $4 trillion.

Fun fact

The Apple logo — the one with a bite taken out — was designed by Rob Janoff in 1977 for $2,000. Janoff has said the bite was included so the apple wouldn't be mistaken for a cherry. Longstanding rumors suggest that it references Alan Turing, the computing pioneer who died after eating a cyanide-laced apple. Janoff, for his part, has said that’s a lovely story but not true.

Take me down this rabbithole

A collector tracked down all 13 colors of the iMac G3 (sold in the late ‘90s through early 2000s), in shades from Bondi Blue to Tangerine, which some of us will remember as being the family computer and a dorm room staple.