Apple: The First 50 Years

by David Pogue

Instant New York Times Bestseller

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, the most valuable company in the world. The book features new facts that correct the record and illuminate its subversive culture and fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple into what it is today.

On April 1, 1976, two scruffy twentysomethings, both named Steve, founded a startup. Their To bring the revolutionary power of computers to everyone.

Over the next five decades, Apple reshaped the technology and cultural landscapes, introducing the public to breakthroughs like the mouse, laser printing, CD-ROM, WiFi, digital video, home networking, touchscreen phones, and tablets. Jobs’s obsessive eye for detail set the stage for products—Mac, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch—that married advanced technology with beauty, simplicity, and fine design.

Deeply researched, The First 50 Years includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives. The book busts long-held myths; goes backstage for both the titanic successes (450 million iPods, 700 million iPads, 2.2 billion iPhones) and the instructive failures (Lisa, Apple III, MobileMe); and assesses the forces that challenge Apple’s dominance as it enters its second half century.

Bursting with tales of frenetic all-nighters, engineering genius, and creative rebellion, this book is a true testament to Apple’s unique and innovative vision, and a must read for anyone whose life Apple has touched.

Genres: Business, History, Technology, Nonfiction, Biography, Audiobook, Science

Audible Audio

First published March 26, 2026

About the author

David Pogue, Yale '85, is the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. His funny tech videos appear weekly on CNBC. And with 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world's bestselling how- to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the "For Dummies" series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music). In 1999, he launched his own series of amusing, practical, and user-friendly computer books called Missing Manuals, which now includes 100 titles.

David and his wife, Jennifer Pogue, MD, live in Connecticut with their three young children.

Reviews

[Yancy Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute joy of a book to read. Well researched with quotes from all of the major Apple players both past and present. “Apple: The First 50 Years” puts a lot of Apple mythology to rest revealing the behind scenes practical and emotional struggles bringing many of Apple’s products to market (and many that never saw the light of day). David Pogue’s prose is breezy and effortless despite having to get into the weeds of some of the more technical processes from time to time. If you are a fan of Apple this book is a must, even if you’re not a fan and just want a fun retrospective on the state of the computer industry from the late Seventies until today this book is a must.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read numerous books about Apple. While this book did not introduce any groundbreaking information, I found it enjoyable nonetheless.
I would like to express my gratitude to NetGalley for providing me with an advance copy of the book.

[Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

This history of Apple doesn’t have terribly much that I haven’t seen before, as a semi-interested Apple watcher, but it is mostly well assembled. It’s got a textbooky aesthetic—tons of inline photos, lots of sidebars—that makes it feel like a reference for the mostly-already-widely known stories of Apple’s history. The book gets less interesting in its final third or so, where we get into the Tim Cook era. I think there are a few reasons for that. First, the company probably just has less intriguing internal drama post–Steve Jobs. And second, many of the people involved are still at Apple, so they’re not spilling the beans on any truly interesting behind-the-scenes stories. (Maybe I’m also just more interested in the aesthetic of 80s/90s computing.) As a result, the last chunk of the book sometimes devolves into lists of products and their features, without a lot of deep analysis or introspection on them.

Also—Pogue’s tone takes some getting used to. He comes across as very colloquial, folksy, and sarcastic. In other words, like a technology opinion columnist (which he is), rather than an author presenting a formal history of Apple. There are also a handful of facts that sounded pretty dubious, and which it seemed like he should have dug deeper on rather than accepting.

Still! The early history stuff remains a fascinating story, and Pogue is at his strongest when he’s recounting the story of Apple’s origins and early years. The heavy photo usage is incredibly helpful here, letting us see those early models of computers right alongside the text.

[Ursula Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Just Wow! I wanted this as soon I saw the preorder. I wanted to hear the history of Apple and this delivered in spades. Author David Pogue used to write the excellent Missing Manual series that covered software and hardware for many Apple devices and services. I was sad when it ended. This is a labor of love and you can tell. I purchased both the Kindle version and the audiobook. The author is a former newsman and is an excellent narrator."

David, not that you don't have enough to do already, you are a fantastic narrator with a gorgeous voice."

While the book has wonderful text, color photos and the wonderful sidebars, you must hear this book on audio. Narration is perfect. It made me laugh, cry and just enjoy. It's more like listening to a wonderful story. It also includes audio clips, so you can actually hear Jobs and Cook during the presentations and some of the other Apple veterans. From both Steves early years to the meeting of key friends, creation of the company, Jobs forced exit and triumphant return to the ground breaking products and Tim Cook's sheparding into the next era are covered. Lots of great stories, sidebars and more make this book a keepsake. I was sad when it ended because I enjoyed it so much. I will definitely to listening to and reading this again. 10 stars if I could and Thank you to the author, for taking us on an incredible journey with a wonderful friend.

[Mark Lieberman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never would've known about this book, until I saw a Facebook ad promoting it. See Facebooks ads sometimes work! I was intrigued, and was interested in reading more about the company history. I knew a little bit, but was ready for a lot more. I do remember as youngster, we had an Apple IIC computer, and I used it.

I think it's really cool that people with similar interests can find each other, as that is how Jobs and Wozniak met way back in 1971! Google the Homebrew Computer Club! I can't even think where society would be if that didn't happen. Would somebody else have stepped up, probably!

This book was very detailed about everything Apple has touched and produced and thought about. Even, what is happening now and in the future is mentioned. From interviews with the key people (Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook, and a lot more folks), the story of how all the products and accompanying software came to be is amazing. Just imagine, a bunch of talented people tinkering with something and when it all comes together, it's something unbelievable that everybody wants. How cool is that? To test those things out at work and see what happens is just a normal process at Apple. Of course, there are also a lot of stories of products that failed or got scrapped.

How did Apple get the ideas for retail stories, the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Fitness, the iPhone, and more is all heavily discussed. Some of the technical jargon (processors and memory) was a bit too much for me to comprehend, but later in the book, I got to understand the A chips and the M chips! Scattered throughout the book were small tidbits about some of the key employees along with their education, jobs before and after Apple, and a quick fun fact for them).

Apple also brought a lot of smaller companies because of their software or hardware expertise.

A direct excerpt from the book that I found really interesting:
"Steve Jobs fell in love with Japanese art in high school, and with his calligraphy at Reed College. By the time he co-founded Apple, he was obsessed with design. Jobs and Jony Ive were even notoriously invested in the backs and even interiors of the products."

Goes to show why the unboxing of Apple products is so fun and exciting, and neat. And why a lot of people hold on to the boxes!

For me, I like the simplicity and the fact that all of my Apple products work very well together. I got an iPad, MacBook Air, iPhone 17, and AirPods. Soon, I may add a new Apple Watch as I gave my current one to my son.

One final thing, before I owned Apple products, I always felt overwhelmed and very intimidated at an Apple Store. But now, I can walk in with confidence and am a part of the Apple community.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Thought I Knew Apple. I Was Wrong.

Even Apple nerds will learn something here

I thought I knew this story cold. I have read just about every Apple history out there, along with countless articles and multiple Steve Jobs biographies. I also served as COO of ComputerLand/Vanstar, a major Apple reseller, in the late 80s and 90s, so I came to this with a lot of background and, honestly, a fair amount of skepticism. I did not expect to find much that felt new.

I was wrong.

This book taught me new things, clarified a few points I had either misunderstood or oversimplified over the years, and did it in a way that never felt dry or recycled. That is not easy to do with Apple. Few companies have been written about more, and a lot of books on the subject end up retelling the same familiar mythology with slightly different packaging. This one does more than that.

I listened to it on Audible, and David’s narration was terrific. A special highlight was his use of what he called sidebars, where he would pause to share fun tidbits and extra context. That added a lot to the experience and helped make a 24 hour book move surprisingly fast.

What impressed me most was not just the depth of the reporting, but the way the whole thing stayed engaging throughout. It is full of detail, but never weighed down by it. Coming from my own background in and around that era of the Apple ecosystem, I appreciated that it rang true while still managing to surprise me. That is a pretty neat trick.

If you are interested in Apple, tech history, or simply a very well told story about how a remarkable company evolved over time, this is absolutely worth your time.

Highly recommended.

[Bikerider99 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended for deep insights into the development process of computers and other advanced technologies. Apple is "different" ... "hard to work for" ... and for many other reason ... these are revealed and explained in the book.
Looooong read. Big book with many useful color illustrations.
Obviously, Steve Jobs as an inventor, investor and product designer is a major force throughout the book. Tim Cook makes his presence felt after Steve is gone. Many other engineers and scientists are highlighted and given credit for moving Apple forward and very quickly.
I may eventually purchase the Kindle version to re-read several sections.
Great book to "gift" to future engineers and to all students in STEM classes. Should be required reading and a STEM class textbook.
The book documents the fact that "doing something that is considered impossible" can be very $$$ rewarding.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond the Keynote Myth: “Apple: The First 50 Years” and the Hidden Machinery Behind the World’s Most Intimate Tech Empire
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 28th, 2026


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“The Return” (1997): In a fluorescent Infinite Loop room, Jobs’s silhouette redraws Apple’s future with the ruthless calm of focus.

David Pogue’s “Apple: The First 50 Years” arrives with the mischievous confidence of a keynote that knows it has the room. The book is, on one level, exactly what its title promises: a brisk, image-rich, anecdote-forward history of the company that taught the modern world to crave rectangles with rounded corners. But Pogue isn’t simply counting anniversaries or building an altar to sleek aluminum. He’s writing an origin story of a sensibility – how a stubborn, aestheticized idea of technology (simple, sealed, delightful; equal parts tool and talisman) became a global operating system for desire. Apple’s story has been told often enough to turn into catechism. Pogue’s advantage is that he knows the catechism, enjoys the catechism, and still bothers to check the footnotes.

The book’s signature move is a kind of cheerful demystification. It refuses the lazy versions of Apple lore, not by dunking on them but by swapping in better stories: the ones that explain how power actually works inside a company built on secrecy, taste, and unreasonable deadlines. Pogue’s voice – wry, plainspoken, a little delighted by human eccentricity, suspicious of sacred cows – keeps the page turning even when the subject is something as potentially sleep-inducing as warehouse inventory or chip roadmaps. He writes the way good tech people talk when they’re not trying to sound like tech people: clean sentences, punchy framing, the occasional dad-joke aside, and an instinct for the telling physical detail (a drawbridge-opening Power Mac, a titanium laptop that made engineers quit, a green LED that says, quietly, “privacy is on”). The effect is that of an accessible guided tour through an institution that has spent five decades insisting you are not allowed in.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“The iMac Moment” (1998): A translucent Bondi-blue iMac glows on a clean desk like a declaration that design can reboot desire.

If Apple has always been, in Jobs’s preferred phrasing, “the whole widget,” Pogue makes a parallel claim about Apple history: you don’t understand the products unless you also understand the choreography that produced them. He is at his best when he treats Apple as a system of constraints – a culture that turns limitation into style. The famed Quadrant of four Macs becomes less a marketing meme than a governing philosophy: focus as theology, the refusal to become Sony or Samsung with their thousands of SKUs. Secrecy becomes not only a tactical advantage but a narrative engine, the reason keynotes landed like cultural events rather than mere product announcements. Even the company’s obsession with packaging is rendered as something like moral philosophy: “You sense care even if you can’t see care,” the idea that the unseen back panel and the invisible internal screws are part of the promise.

Pogue also has a gift for turning engineering into drama without faking conflict where there is none. The most gripping chapters read like a series of elegant emergencies. The iPhone begins as a tablet, detours through the Motorola ROKR misadventure, then gets yanked toward its destiny by a multitouch demo that makes everyone in the room feel the future click into place. The tale of the virtual keyboard – the biggest “how did that not fail?” question of the modern phone – becomes a story about probability, language frequency, and the weird art of making small targets bigger by lying to the finger in mathematically principled ways. The late-stage pivot from plastic to glass is a Pogue-perfect set piece: Jobs, irritated by scratches, calls Corning and essentially dares a dormant 1960s process back to life on a modern deadline. It’s reality distortion field as supply-chain negotiation, the willpower of a founder translated into kiln temperatures and potassium-ion baths.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Purple Dorm” (2004–2007): Behind frosted doors and harsh security light, invention happens in secrecy – a covered prototype breathing under pressure.

But Pogue is too seasoned a narrator to pretend that Apple’s magic is only magic. Over and over, he traces the company’s true genius to a consistent, almost unglamorous pattern: recognizing fledgling technologies, simplifying them, and then forcing the entire ecosystem to behave as if simplicity is natural. The iPod didn’t invent digital music; it made the friction intolerable everywhere else. The App Store didn’t invent software marketplaces; it standardized them, taxed them, and made them feel safer than freedom. The Apple Watch didn’t invent wearables; it made “health” a mainstream product narrative, turning your wrist into a lightly regulated clinic and your daily movement into a set of rings you can’t stop trying to close. Even Vision Pro, the book’s most ambivalent marvel, follows the same arc: take an industry’s crude prototype, over-engineer it into a museum-quality experience, and then wait to see if the world is ready to make the leap from “wow” to “why do I need this?”

Pogue’s structure – fifty chapters that behave like well-timed vignettes, each with its own hook and payoff – matches the Apple rhythm he’s describing. There is, throughout, a keynote cadence: unveil the problem, dramatize the constraint, deliver the solution, let the audience gasp, toss in the human aside. That rhythm is not an accident; it is part of the author’s style as a communicator. One can feel the broadcaster’s instinct for pacing and the columnist’s affection for the small absurdities that explain the big machinery. A meeting becomes a myth generator. A debate about the orientation of a laptop logo becomes a parable about whose gaze matters. The “slide to unlock” gesture becomes both an ergonomic safeguard against butt-dialing and a decade-long legal war. The book is full of these little apertures where design becomes sociology.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“The Keynote Tightrope” (Jan 2007): From the wings, the iPhone arrives as stage magic – a flawless spotlight balancing on a backstage wire of glitches.

And yet, for all its pleasures, the Apple story in 2026 cannot be told as pure triumph. Pogue doesn’t ignore the darker strands, and some of the book’s most modern energy arrives when he stops celebrating the products and starts examining the trade-offs. China, here, is not merely a manufacturing note; it is the operational substrate of Apple’s empire and the geopolitical fault line under its feet. The Foxconn suicide crisis is framed as the moment Western consumers were forced to see the hidden human costs of frictionless gadgets – the dormitories, the churn, the nets that critics called tone-deaf and Jobs defended as pragmatic. Pogue acknowledges the reforms, the audits, the transparency reports, but the broader question hangs in the air: can a company whose brand is care reconcile that promise with a global supply chain optimized for speed and margin? In an era of tariffs-as-threats, export controls, and rising industrial policy, Apple’s reliance on “China speed” reads less like a clever strategy than a vulnerability you can name.

Similarly, the book’s long view on “closed systems” lands with renewed bite at a moment when regulators around the world are treating Apple’s integration not as a virtue but as a possible monopoly costume. The App Store – once a heroic defense against malware and “buggy crud” – becomes, in the later chapters, an arena of injunctions and resentments: Epic’s rebellion, commission battles, forced links, and the dawning reality that “walled garden” is a phrase that can be said with either admiration or accusation. This is where Pogue’s light touch becomes a mixed blessing. His narrative keeps moving, and his tone stays companionable, but the stakes are enormous: control as safety, control as profit, control as power. In 2026, that triangle is not a thought experiment. It is a set of lawsuits, legislative acts, and design changes that alter what “the iPhone experience” even means depending on which country you live in.


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Foxconn / China Speed”: Endless rows and cold dorm light reveal the invisible engine of elegance: scale, discipline, and human cost.

The book’s most delicate chapter, perhaps inevitably, is the one about AI. Here Pogue captures both the cultural vertigo of the ChatGPT era and Apple’s characteristic refusal to behave like a startup. Apple Intelligence, as he describes it, is a suite of “nips and tucks” rather than fireworks: writing tools, summaries, cleanup brushes, a scattering of small conveniences that feel more like iOS features than a new species of mind. Critics yawn; Apple insists it’s “a journey.” The drama arrives with Siri – the promise of a truly personal agent, the demo that makes investors swoon, the delay, the anxiety about hallucinations, the awkwardness of advertising a thing that isn’t shipping. It’s a story that echoes earlier Apple lessons about preannouncing – “Newton,” “AirPower” – but now the stakes include trust itself. Pogue’s reportorial instinct is sharp here: he doesn’t need to declare a verdict, because the narrative contains its own warning. A company that built its modern religion on showing the working product onstage cannot afford too many concept videos.

If there is a quiet thesis threading through all fifty years, it’s this: Apple’s greatest inventions are not devices but expectations. The company taught us to demand beauty from tools, to feel personally wronged by ugly interfaces, to treat friction as an insult. It also taught us to live inside a continuous river of notifications, photos, messages, and streaming media – “the end of boredom,” as Pogue writes – and then to worry about what that river has done to our attention, our politics, and our loneliness. The iPhone’s cultural impact is rendered here as both triumph and complication, an enabling technology that made entire industries possible while also helping to accelerate a world where reality itself is a little easier to stage-manage.

What makes Pogue’s book particularly satisfying is that it’s not only a Jobs epic, though Jobs remains its gravitational center. Pogue is careful to give the supporting cast their due: the engineers who live inside the consequences of perfectionism, the operations leaders who turn ideology into shipping boxes, the designers who argue about invisible corners, the executives who inherit a legend and must do something other than impersonate it. The Cook era, in Pogue’s telling, is less a decline than a pivot: from category-defining hardware to services, from charismatic genius to institutional machinery, from a company that made “things” to a company that makes recurring revenue and ecosystem gravity. There is an argument embedded here that the modern Apple may be more financially formidable than ever – yet culturally less incandescent – and that this might be less a failure of imagination than a shift in the era’s available “low-hanging fruit.”


Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Apple Park + Loss” (2011–2017): The ring at dusk reads like a monument – a quiet architecture of legacy, absence, and continuation.

You can feel, in these later sections, Pogue’s awareness of the books that hover in the background of any Apple history. The myth-busting and the corporate interiority echo “Inside Apple.” The supply-chain and China chapters nod toward the harder, more critical tradition of “After Steve” and “Apple in China.” The design worship and process language recall “Creative Selection” and “Insanely Simple.” The long moral argument about secrecy, focus, and taste is a descendant of “Becoming Steve Jobs,” which framed the founder not as a saint or villain but as an evolving instrument of ambition. Pogue’s difference is tonal: he is less prosecutorial than most of his comps, and more committed to the pleasure of the story. That choice may frustrate readers who want a sharper knife, but it is also the reason the book can do what it does best: make the complicated history readable without making it simplistic.

As a reader, I found myself admiring how Pogue balances three tasks that usually break a book when attempted together: he tells a sweeping corporate history; he explains technology to nontechnical readers without condescension; and he keeps returning to the human texture – the neuroses, the loyalties, the moments of kindness that complicate the caricature of Jobs as pure tyrant. The chapters on loss, on the memorials, and on the quieter acts of care land precisely because Pogue doesn’t oversell them. He trusts the stories: Jobs sneaking an acupuncturist into a hospital room, the private insistence on not asking “what Steve would have done,” the grief of an institution that was, for better and worse, built around a single person’s taste.

To say that a book about Apple is “timely” is almost redundant; Apple is one of the few corporations that functions as a civic infrastructure of everyday life. But this book is timely in a sharper way: it offers a narrative map for the present moment’s anxieties. If you want to understand why regulators are fighting platform power, why privacy has become a selling point, why “made in China” is no longer a neutral label, why AI is both carnival and crisis, why the phone feels like a comfort object and a trap – you could do worse than spend time inside Pogue’s version of the last half century. He doesn’t pretend the story is finished. He ends, instead, with throughlines: focus, secrecy, beauty, simplicity, sustainability, accessibility, privacy – the values Apple cites as its alibi and its engine. Whether those values are enough to carry the company through its next fifty years is the open question. Pogue, wisely, refuses to predict the future with too much confidence. The book’s final effect is something rarer than prophecy: a lucid sense of how the present got built.

In the end, “Apple: The First 50 Years” feels like the product it describes: obsessively assembled, friendly on the surface, intricate underneath, occasionally infuriating in what it chooses to leave out, and undeniably hard to put down. My rating: 89 out of 100.

[Bob Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was there too!

What a treat! David Pogue did what only David Pogue could do. Write a big book about Apple from the standpoint of products and services. His writing is compelling with just the right level of detail.

I have been an Apple fanboy since buying my first Mac in 1985. So I didn’t participate as an Apple customer for all of the 50 years, but I came somewhat close (41 years).

[Noah Salzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Reed, amazing history!

Fantastic history of Apple. We’ve heard many of the stories, but now they’ve been fact checked and they’re all in one place. A real page clicker.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

great read!

Well, I've always liked Apple products, but have leaned toward cheaper PCs. Now, I'm an Apple person through and through.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Apple: The First 50 Years,” by David Pogue, is a captivating history of Apple’s remarkable fifty-year journey. The book is divided into four chronological parts, which take readers through the evolution of Apple’s products and services, and the stories of those who created them. We see Apple’s management, creativity and innovation, marketing campaigns, and pursuit of excellence in motion. We also witness the genius of Steve Jobs, without whose passion, vision, and relentless determination Apple would cease to exist.

Part 1 introduces us to Steve Wozniak (“Woz”) and Steve Jobs—from how they met, to their early ventures, to their founding of “Apple Computer Company” on April 1, 1976. We progress through Apple’s early computers, including the Apple II and Macintosh, and explore the development of Apple’s operating system and software. We also experience John Sculley’s power struggle with Jobs, which resulted in Jobs’s demotion and subsequent resignation.

Part 2 covers the years without Steve Jobs, during which multiple Apple CEOs were ousted. Sculley, Pepsi-Cola’s former president, was Apple’s CEO. His eventual removal was due, in part, to his failure to consummate a merger that would lessen the dominance of PCs running Microsoft Windows on Intel chips. Michael Spindler, an engineer already running multiple Apple divisions, took over as CEO. But declining sales and “rock bottom” morale contributed to his removal. Gil Amelio, the CEO of National Semiconductor, became the new CEO. However, consumer sales were not Amelio’s forte. Apple’s mounting financial difficulties elevated its bankruptcy risk and Amelio was fired.

Part 3 centers on Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. After leaving Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, which had developed a dazzling, colorful, and easy-to-use multitasking operating system called NeXTSTEP. Unlike Apple’s Mac OS, which kept crashing, NeXTSTEP was highly stable. So, while Amelio was still CEO, Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple in an advisory role. Within a few months of Amelio’s firing, Jobs became Apple’s interim CEO and later its permanent CEO. After returning to Apple, we see Jobs’s genius on full display. We witness the game-changing creation of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, apps, and more, all of which led to Apple’s incredible turnaround. Sadly, we also discover Jobs’s battle with pancreatic cancer, which led to his untimely death.

Part 4 addresses Tim Cook’s tenure as Apple’s CEO. Before Jobs died, he resigned as Apple’s CEO. Cook, who was Apple’s COO, assumed the CEO role. We are taken through several successes under Cook’s leadership, including the dramatic growth in Apple Services (e.g., Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+) and the introduction of Apple Watch and Apple Silicon. We also learn about Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence, which are not yet as successful, and about headwinds over app store charges and Apple’s reliance on China.

“Apple: The First 50 Years” is a comprehensive and compelling account of Apple’s first fifty years. The award-winning author skillfully takes readers through Apple’s history, products and services, stories of key employees, and iconic culture. Apple fans, technology and history buffs, and countless others will greatly enjoy the author’s well-written account of Apple’s epic journey. The book also contains numerous photos and images that help bring Apple’s story to life.

[My special thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book.]

[Konstantin Malaev · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this is a very detailed and interesting book on the topic, it does not provide any meaningful new information for anyone remotely interested in Apple products.

The book has nice pacing and relevant stories all up until the iPhone. Then, it disassociates and branches out into many different topics with really irrelevant pacing (covering the iPhone X and Liquid Glass before the death of Steve Jobs). This is not a chronological book then?

But, more importantly, the information in almost all of the chapters past 2007 is not novel. It’s oversimplified, and underwritten.

And that is an issue, because we already have many books that cover the development of the iPod and iPhone. In this book, there were a few new facts, like the names of certain designers, three office stories, and two product trivia facts — but every other topic, was covered both in Fedell and Kocienda and Isacsson books on Apple 2000-2007.

Some of the most dramatic product shifts, debates, and clashes happened after the death of Jobs.

Like in 2012 — with the firing of Apple’s ad agency and abrupt shift in Marketing style (covered in a Samsung lawsuit), or in 2013 — with the iOS 7 redesign (This book has a dedicated chapter on Squircle iOS 7 icons, and uses a WRONG icon shape, while the whole point of the whole chapter was the new shape? So many missed details like this, from the weird Microsoft Office font over the modern iPad lineup, to the misaligned Rings graphic on the Watch, to the bad stitching on the Cupertino map on the beginning)

What about the trash-can Mac Pro and the clash the design studio had with the leadership on that? What about the 2014 Apple Watch launch that was fashion focused (New Yorker had a brilliant 20 page expose on this topic in 2014, interviewing Ive and Marc Newson, and Alan Dye, with so much insight and incredible stories about the studio that were so relevant to the shaping of modern Apple, and all of it was missing from this book.)

This historic era brought the 12” MacBook, the notebook that changed the way Apple builds notebooks forever (and not primarily in the negative way people interpret it today). Its developement shaped so much of every Apple product since, yet it was mentioned not a single time in this book?

What about the leadership switch, the launch and design process of products like the failed AirPower, Dynamic Island, AirPods Max, E.Hankey’s departure, the whole industrial design shift in 2021 with the iMac/MacBook Pro… So many key points that defined the past 10 years of Apple, without a single word of them.

Even still with it’s 800 pages, this is a broad overview book with recycled information from the books of past Apple employees and Steve’s biography. And a couple of interviews just because.

This is not a book that provides meaningful knowledge to people interested in Apple, and dissapoints with its premise — this book should be titled Apple 40.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who has had an Apple machine in his house since 1980, I’m always up for learning more about the history of the company. My dad was employed there from 1980-1993 and I got to hear a lot of tidbits of the history as normal dinner talk. At that time in the Bay Area, your parents usually worked at Apple, HP, or Lockheed. It was normal for engineers to be doing semi-crazy things as main or side projects. Or at least I thought it was.

The book is a series of snapshots during the past 50 years of Apple as a company. A lot of the ups and downs of running a company that became super popular due to a single product shines through. The author keeps the focus on Jobs throughout, sometimes to the detriment of others I felt. Yes, Jobs is a central light, but there are also a lot of other characters in the background that could have provided even more insight.

While I understand that the book couldn’t be several volumes, there is a lot of historical tidbits that are missing or glossed over. The Mac graphing calculator is an example of engineers who worked on something super cool, even after being laid off! (They would sneak back into the building to write the code) Or during the NeXT demo to Apple, how Jobs, to really show off how solid the OS was, kept opening more and more video windows. In the book its a couple sentences of how polished the demo was. Instead it was pure Jobs, where he really played up the theatrical flourishes, as he knew just how good NeXT’s OS was, especially compared to BeOS or System 7.

I also found a lot of typos in the book, especially when it came to numbers. GB are used instead of MB for the memory capability of a Mac. Or 3,000 iPhones made a day when it probably is more like 300,000+ a day. The book felt a bit rushed, especially as Apple hits its stride post-Jobs 2011. Maybe there are less interesting stories of the newer products than those in the 1980’s.

As an overview, the book works. There is a lot here that will take folks that kinda know the company and show them just how far Apple fell before rising again. Or why Jobs’s emphasis on design continues to make a huge difference in Apple’s products today.

It just happened that I found Andy Hertzfeld’s book about the development of the Mac last week at a used bookstore. It is referenced in David Pogue’s bibliography. I think there are more in depth books on specific aspects of Apple history that will scratch my itch to revisit those days.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apple: The First 50 Years is a book for anyone interested in history, creativity, technology, and how things are made. It's a fun read with many twists and turns. A business or a product does not materialize overnight, is rarely easy, and involves many, many players.

For those who lived through the rapid changes in the 70s and the 80s during the birth of consumer-focused computers this book is a historical roadtrip. We meet not only the most familiar but the less well-known persons involved in development of hardware, software, fonts, video, and much much more. The use of profile windows with information of the work before, during, and post-Apple of various individuals is a welcomed touch to emphasize the many people involved and the wide skill sets both personal and professional.

More important is a view of the work. Anyone who only knows about smartphones, tablets, and laptops of today, this history tells you how it came about with the leaps, retreats, exhausting work schedules, and how some things led, sometimes unexpectantly, to what we know and experience today.

Even if some of Apple's story is familiar I still highly recommend reading this book. I read this not as an Apple fan, but as someone interested in history and of technology of all types, (Disclosure: I am a Windows PC owner/user with an Android phone who also owns an iPad. I've used mainframes, a wide range of computer products, and act as my family's tech service. So I'm a generalist consumer and not a developer.)

NOTE: Unpaid review. Thanks to NetGalley for an Advanced Reader's Copy (ARC).

[Scott Budman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fortunate to get an early copy of this book, prior to interviewing Pogue at the Commonwealth Club.
I expected this to be good in parts .. after all, Apple had some slow years, and failed products.
But .. it's all really good. Even the slow times are fascinating. Being from the Bay Area (where Apple was born and still HQed), this story is our tech soap opera.

Pogue, as always, writes terrifically, and keeping the story chronological gives the whole thing a solid steady pace. There's a lot here, including stories from more than 100 Apple/former Apple employees you've never heard of, but who have really interesting stories to tell.

This is a great read, and a must for Apple completists.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

An aesthetically well-made corporate history of Apple; based off the cover alone it was obvious that this book should be purchased as a physical object. The photos and the asides (in curved blue boxes) in the book are enjoyable; this book is genuinely enjoyable to physically read. The narrative assumes some familiarity with Apple and modern culture; if looked at as a historical artifact that people will go back to read fifty years from now, future readers may need to look up additional context. For the target audience of people in the present day who would like to read a book about Apple, this book is great and almost anyone should be able to find something interesting or enjoyable in it.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apple

The first 3 out of 4 parts of this are a fun run down of Apple's history: after the founder's passing to iHeaven it becomes much less essential. After listening to a couple audiobooks came across the first 'Easter Egg' - that was kind of funny. But anyone interested in more recent Apple business would be better served by picking up McGee's excellent "Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company".

[EM]

The book is good and well written
Ultimately I just wasn’t that interested in listening to this much detail on this story and had already read Walter jsaacson’s book so some of it was duplicative
But I do recommend if this topic is of interest

[8ThumbsUp · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its best, an enthralling dive in the products that made this great American company. At its worst, a boring list of projects and product updates. Read it for its great moments but perhaps skip some of the slower sections.

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 3/8, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.

[Andy Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative!

[Jose Antonio La Rosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful Book!!!

I loved this book!!!
Full of insights and details.
Totally loved it.
Thank you very much for putting it together.

[Jens Poder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superhyggeligt nostatrip ❤️