50 years of Apple
We're celebrating Apple's 50th birthday with a week of content about the tech giant. It covers everything from personal recollections from our writers to the greatest — and worst — Apple gadgets as voted by you, and you can read it all on our 50 years of Apple page.
I had no idea I was watching a genius's swan song. Sure, Steve Jobs was painfully thin, pacing the WWDC 2011 stage methodically as he walked through iOS 5, the new iCloud, and macOS Lion, but the audience was mesmerized. Jobs was smart, engaged, excited, and funny. He was Apple.
Apple didn't falter. Tim Cook slid into the driver's seat without so much as a pit stop. He took the stage at Apple's old Cupertino headquarters hours before Jobs died to unveil the iPhone 4s and Siri, and it looked to me as if he'd been doing it his whole life.
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15 years later, as Apple celebrates 50 years as a company, I find myself thinking back to Jobs, Woz, what they built, and why we all just feel differently about Apple.
Apple is special because Jobs was special
Think about it. Apple has its ardent fans and its ardent detractors. What it lacks are people in the middle, those who have no feelings about the company.
Apple was built to be not just a tech company but also an expression of cool. Now ‘cool' can sound retro or even corny, but this is not some kind of Arthur Fonzerelli cool. It's an aesthetic that instantly communicates difference. Apple's choices in hardware and design were, even in its earliest days, imbued with Steve Jobs' own obsession with craftsmanship and materials.
If Wozniak was the technical genius with a savant's gift for electronics engineering, Jobs was the one who…