INNOVATION

Apple turns 50 today. I'm not a fanboy anymore. But does that matter? These words are being typed on a MacBook, after I read the morning news on my iPad, before which I woke up to an iPhone alarm – with a meditation track on my AirPods. Like millions of others, it's still woven into the rhythm of my days. But that's not all. Some of the most formative years of my career were at Apple, when Steve Jobs had just returned. The dot-com crash was swallowing companies around us – but in our little office at MG Road, Bangalore, we were oblivious. We’d crowd around the iMac, slide the Monthly Update CD from Cupertino into its magentic slot, that went in with a hypnotic whoosh, ("no ugly CD trays, you know"), and watch Steve own the stage like no one else could. “Forget the specs. Focus on the user benefits.” “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." "We are here to make a dent in the universe." We believed every word. They became our mantras for life. And the pace was dizzying. Every few months, a new marvel came into our lives – the iMac, the iBook, the iPod, the PowerMac, even the Cube, a commercial failure that you couldn't stop staring at. They were sculptures that happened to compute. Apple made us believe that technology could move you the way a painting does. Steve made us believe that rockstars don’t always hold a guitar. So yes, I'm not a fanboy anymore. But Steve – and Apple – changed me in ways I'm still discovering. The world is being rewritten again. This time, by AI. I hope Apple makes a dent in this new universe too. Here's to the next 50.

→ View original post on X — @parrysingh, 2026-04-01 02:33 UTC