Originally published at: What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses - TidBITS
April 1 marks the 50th anniversary of the corporate founding of Apple Computer. Numerous entities have marked the event with articles, videos, gatherings, and even books. I’ve collected the most compelling of these in TidBITS Talk for those who are interested.
However, I must confess to a distinct lack of interest, even though most of Apple’s history overlaps with my own. The Apple I came before my computing years—I was only 9 when Apple was founded—but my first computer in high school was a Franklin ACE 1000—an Apple ][+ clone that Apple sued out of existence. I went to college in 1985 with an Atari 1040ST that provided more power than the Mac for less money, but Cornell University was an early member of the Apple University Consortium, so Macs were everywhere on campus. I became proficient with the Mac while working in public computer rooms, and in my junior year, Tonya and I purchased a double-floppy Macintosh SE, which we later upgraded to an SE/30 with an internal hard drive. That was the Mac I used when we started TidBITS in April 1990, and I’ve owned and used innumerable Apple products in the subsequent 36 years.
Why I Have Trouble Celebrating
Until April 1 rolled around and I realized that I should write something despite other deadlines looming, I hadn’t thought much about why I’m so disengaged with Apple’s history. To an extent, it’s because Apple is work for me, not a hobby. I can’t say when that switch flipped—computers were as much an entertainment as employment for many years—but these days, reading or watching pieces about Apple feels like a chore, not something I do for pleasure. Either I already know the material, or I have to evaluate whether it warrants coverage in TidBITS. Worse, when the time period covered includes events I know about, I can’t help but be slightly annoyed if my recollection differs or if the person writing had been given much better access than I received from Apple. It’s no longer enjoyable.
I also avoid revisiting the past to keep myself from feeling bad about it. There was a lot of idealism wrapped up in the early days of Apple and—even more for me—the Internet. From the perspective of the early 1990s, we are very much living in a science fiction future, technically speaking. Even the iPhone 17 I carry now is vastly more powerful than the Macs I used in the early 1990s—its processor is tens of thousands of times faster, its display packs nearly twenty times as many pixels, and its Internet connection is always available and thousands of times faster than the dial-up modems of the era.
But as much as I adore much of this technology, I can’t say it has made the world a better place. We were undoubtedly naive, but there was a distinct belief that technological advances would improve the human condition. That has happened in some places and situations, but I remain deeply troubled by the direct and indirect societal ills caused by the tech giants. We used to cast IBM as the industry’s “evil empire,” but in hindsight, its buttoned‑down monopoly looks positively staid next to the extractive surveillance machines of X/Twitter and Meta/Facebook. And then there are all the outright illegal activities that have forced us all to think nonstop about digital security—how many times per day do you enter passwords? Apple may be the best of the lot, but it’s a low bar, and Apple is still clearly willing to put profit ahead of principle.
It Was Never Really About Apple
Much of my lack of interest in Apple’s history stems from a simple fact: companies have no soul, and Apple is no exception. What’s special about Apple is not the company; it’s the people who build, support, write about, and use Apple-adjacent products that matter. I got into technology because I love explaining how things work and seeing people’s eyes light up when I show them what’s possible or solve a problem they couldn’t figure out. Much of my enjoyment of covering Apple came from the relationships I built through years of thoughtful email, along with in-person interactions at Macworld Expo, other conferences, and Mac user group meetings.
Very little of that came from Apple itself, and much of it is now gone. Discussion forums that once hosted in-depth conversations among people who made things happen in the industry have given way to snarky social media posts. Conferences have almost entirely disappeared, and those that remain lack the weight of Macworld Expo as a must-attend event. Most Mac user groups have folded or are a shadow of their former selves (the Naples MacFriends User Group is a shining counterexample). I keep TidBITS Talk going because it provides an important community, even if few of the participants will ever meet in person.
There may be a better path forward—one informed by looking back not at Apple itself, but at what grew up around it. The cliché is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I prefer a version that author Rebecca Solnit ascribes to a poet and arborist named Joe Lamb: “We need to remember that we can learn from and repeat the successes of the past.”
What Comes Next
So, in keeping with Steve Jobs’s focus on the future, I suggest that those of us who struggle to dwell on the past take Apple Fellow Alan Kay’s advice to heart: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
I applied that idea to start TidBITS, come up with the first advertising on the Internet (which I’m now embarrassed by, given how exploitative a business model it turned out to be), write the fifth book about the Internet (Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, which came with the first flat-rate consumer Internet account), and build a successful ebook publishing system with Take Control Books.
All of that was aimed at helping people use technology to improve their lives and the world around them. Now I—and anyone else who feels this loss of community—need to think about which lessons from the past are worth carrying forward and how best to do that. What would you do?
