Apple at 50: From Apple I to the iPhone to AI and beyond

April 1 marks 50 years since Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (who quickly left the company) founded Apple (AAPL), then called Apple Computers.

The company that exists today is a far cry from its humble beginnings in the Jobs’ family garage, where a small team of technology buffs formed one of the most important businesses in modern history.

Initially formed as a way to sell Wozniak’s Apple I computer to fellow enthusiasts, Apple has repeatedly reinvented itself over the years, going from desktop computer maker to portable music player maker to a smartphone giant, and now to a music and video streaming provider.

That ability to repeatedly transform itself throughout the years is the key to Apple’s perseverance over the last half-century. Despite facing near bankruptcy in the late 1990s, the company managed to rebuild and now stands as the second-most-valuable publicly traded business in the world.

A projection lights up the power station as Mumford & Sons perform during Apple's 50th Anniversary celebration at Battersea Power Station on March 25, 2026, in London, England. (Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

Apple’s 50th anniversary, however, comes at a potentially pivotal moment for the company. As AI continues to dominate the tech industry, Apple is widely seen as falling behind its peers. Its AI-enhanced version of Siri is still behind schedule, and the company has been losing AI experts to competing firms.

Now Apple will need to once again harness its capacity for change to ensure it’s around for another 50 years.

From the Apple I to the iPhone

The Apple I and its follow-up, the Apple II, were among the first personal computers to hit the market. They were also nothing like the desktops and laptops we know today.

The Apple I was more or less a computer circuit board with built-in chips that needed to be connected to a separate power supply, keyboard, and TV screen. The Apple II came with a keyboard and power supply, but still needed a separate display.

Cassandra Hatton, senior specialist in Fine Books and Manuscripts and director of the History of Science at Bonhams, shows an Apple I computer in operational condition during an auction preview in Hong Kong, March 19, 2015. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

Bill Fernandez, Apple’s first employee who was also a childhood friend of Jobs and Wozniak, told Yahoo Finance that there was a “palpable sense of magic in the air” as the company went from developing computers for fellow tech aficionados to systems for mainstream consumers.

“We also felt that there was a lot that computers could do for individuals — ordinary, non-technical people,” he explained.

Apple wasn’t the only company racing to build personal computers at the time, though. Radio Shack and Commodore were also working on their own systems.

But Fernandez said Apple succeeded thanks to its marketing, product quality, service, and sales teams.

“We tried to do everything that a professional company does, and do it as well as a really good professional company would do it.”

Steve Jobs announces the new iPod with video capabilities. (Photo by Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images)

Tim Monzures worked at Apple for nearly 14 years during the company’s iPhone era and saw a different kind of company than Fernandez. At that point, Apple had ousted Jobs as CEO in 1985, survived a near collapse, and eventually brought Jobs back to lead the company in 1997.

It wasn’t Apple Computers anymore, either. It was just Apple, after Jobs officially changed the company’s name in 2007, marking a shift from computers to the broader consumer electronics category.

Monzures, now CEO of Attrove, was an Apple intern when Jobs famously unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, and he later worked in the company’s wireless hardware group.

At that point, Apple was scaling its iPhone output to meet consumer demand, something that Tim Cook, who took over as CEO when Jobs stepped down in 2011, and his operational skills were especially suited to.

Steve Jobs holds the first iPhone in San Francisco, Calif., on Jan. 9, 2007. REUTERS/Kimberly White (UNITED STATES)

Monzures said he traveled back and forth to China some 60 times in a decade, as Apple ramped iPhone capacity.

“I got to see that from the hardware side of things, specifically … how to go from maybe one to 1,000 to 1 million [iPhones] a day or whatever they were producing. It was crazy, yeah. So anyway, that was my experience,” he explained.

“I think the interesting thing is, it really went from [Jobs], who was a product guy, strong conviction, here's what we need to do, visionary, … to [Cook], who really is good at operations and execution,” Monzures said. “The culture there changed a little bit, but I think the focus on quality and consistency was still there.”

Fernandez, who left Apple for a brief stint before returning in the 1980s, said it’s that kind of change and the ability to hold on to quality as a guiding ethos that has helped the company move forward.

Apple CEO Tim Cook attends a product launch event in Cupertino, California, the United States, on Sept. 9, 2025. (Photo by Wu Xiaoling/Xinhua via Getty Images)

And while other former employees may disagree with how Apple has reshaped itself over the years, Fernandez said he’s glad the company continues to do so.

“I feel that anything that's alive is going to grow through stages, and in each stage it's going to morph into something different than it was in the previous stage,” he said.

“I expect something that's living and growing as a viable organism is going to shift through multiple stages. So I don't have any problem with Apple morphing from a hobbyist company to a technologies company to … not necessarily a computer company anymore. I'm very cool with that.”

Apple’s future

While Apple has overcome a multitude of challenges in the past, its current artificial intelligence shortcomings are driving concern among investors.

Apple, like a number of tech companies, was caught flat-footed when OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) launched ChatGPT in November 2022. But while others like Google (GOOG) have managed to catch up and exceed OpenAI in some respects, Apple is still struggling to gain ground.

It has signed an agreement to use Google’s Gemini AI models for its Apple Foundation Models and to power its next-generation Siri. We’ll learn more about Apple’s AI work next month during the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

It’s not just Apple’s AI dilemma, though. The company has been criticized for not releasing any new groundbreaking products in the years since debuting the iPhone.

“The iPhone is such a momentous product, the gravity of that is so high that it could suck Apple back in,” Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee told Yahoo Finance. “So in some sense, it has to escape the gravity of its greatest success to be successful in the following years.”

Apple has taken steps in that direction by focusing more on its Services segment, now its second-largest behind the iPhone. Services include everything from Apple TV+ and Apple Music+ to AppleCare and Apple Fitness+.

In the company’s fiscal 2025, Services accounted for $109.2 billion of Apple’s $416.2 billion in total revenue. The iPhone brought in $201.2 billion.

All of this could lead to yet another permutation of Apple that’s more focused on platforms and services than devices.

It’s difficult to imagine what the company could be if it lasts another 50 years, just as there’s no way Jobs, Wozniak, and Fernandez could have envisioned what it is today.