Apple turns 50 years old tomorrow. I’ve been using its products for 48 of those years.
48 years. Over those five decades, my relationship with Apple has shifted as dramatically as its market cap. And not, I am afraid, in a good way.
I first used an Apple product in 1978. I was in middle school when my parents brought home a new Apple II. My mother, a teacher, took advantage of Apple’s focus on the education market. I remember writing papers using huge floppy disks and digging the dot-matrix printer, but that was about it. In the late 70s, Apple seemed like a cool new company at the forefront of a cool new industry. But what did I know, I was a kid.
By the time I left for college, my father had an IBM PC, which I rarely used, and my mother had upgraded to an Apple IIc, which came out at roughly the same time as the Macintosh. I’d taken a few programming courses at my high school – I could write a tic-tac-toe game in BASIC, run DOS programs from the C: Prompt, and futz around with some Pascal. But I was a writer at heart, not a coder.
In college I knew enough about computers to cobble together a cloned IBM 286 machine, which I used to earn extra money scripting databases for a small software developer. I couldn’t afford the Mac – it was priced at around $2,500 in 1984 – roughly $8,000 in today’s dollars. But I had some wealthy friends, and when my boss asked if I had access to a Mac to beta test a new app he was building, I borrowed a friend’s machine and fired it up for the first time.
As I wrote in The Search, that moment changed my life. I instantly knew that this machine was the most important artifact ever created by humankind. I wanted to tell the story of its impact on the world. My first job out of college, at a startup magazine called MacWeek, was reporting on Apple and the ebullient industry surrounding it.
Apple in its early years was a pirate company, positioned as a counterweight to the hegemony of much larger companies that dominated the nascent computer industry. Microsoft and Intel were not just behemoths, they were evil, mendacious, and utterly corporate. Apple, on the other hand, represented creativity, human spirit, and independence. Those of us in the “Macintosh community” cast ourselves as morally superior underdogs – the heroes of an unimaginably exciting new story.
That’s not to say we didn’t view Apple as an adversary. My early career was driven by a reporter’s zeal to overcome the company’s famous secrecy. We reveled in scoops about the company’s new hardware, software, and business strategy. We scrutinized its every move and executive utterance. Our motivation was more more than reportorial glory – we felt it was our job to keep the company on track, to ensure it would win in a world dominated by ugly companies with unsavory values. If, as we believed, all of society would someday be driven by this emerging digital industry, we wanted the good guys to win.
I map the rise of digital technology over the past half century in nine overlapping eras. Apple features prominently in most of them:
1970s–1984 — Early Personal Computing
1984–1990 — The Macintosh Era
1985–1993 — The First Online Services
1993–2001 — Early Web
1994–2002 — The Dot-Com Boom and Bust
2003–2012 — Search, Social and Web 2.0
2012–2018. — Rise of the Oligarchy
2018–2022 — Consolidation and Political Power
2022–pres. — The (Early) AI Era
I used Apple products in each of those eras, and I’m still using a Mac today. But I’ve avoided all of Apple’s products after it entered the smartphone market. I don’t use the iPhone, I’ve never relied on iCloud, and Apple’s app store remains a foreign destination. I switched to Google’s Pixel in 2012, and I’ve never looked back. The reason? I felt that Apple had taken its business strategy of vertical integration too far. With the iPhone, Apple began to act like all those companies it once railed against: A massive juggernaut bent on locking its customers into beautifully designed walled gardens.
The worst offender? The Apple App Store, where Apple dictated what software its customers could and could not use. Steve Jobs famously called mobile carriers “orifices” that locked their customers into paternalistic and deeply misaligned relationships. With the App Store, Apple built the biggest orifice of them all.
Which leads me to why I decided to write about Apple today. As I laid out above, we’re now in the AI era of computing. Apple hasn’t exactly been a leading player in AI – but it’s certainly poised to be. The company wasn’t a player in search or social either, but thanks to its near death grip on distribution, it managed to profit handsomely from both those developments. The same strategy is playing out in AI. Those 1.6 billion active iPhones will all be running AI, AI that can only be accessed through Apple’s orifices. And Apple will happily make hundreds of billions in AI profit along the way.
Unless, of course, the AI ecosystem treats the app store as damage, and beings to route around it. That seems to be the case with AI coding apps, which allow end users to build, well, whatever the hell they want to build. That reads as dangerous to the Apple’s corporate interests, and yesterday, the company did exactly what one might expect a dinosaur to do when faced with mammals scurrying around its feet. It stomped. (It already stomps all over Mac-based AI coding, for more on that, see my last post).
50 years into the Apple revolution, the rebel has become the tyrant. There’s much, much more to say about how Apple is architecting control over the coming AI wave. But for today, on the cusp of the company’s 50th birthday, I’ll leave it at this: If Apple has its way, our industry, and our society, will be much the poorer for it.
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