By Jason Snell

March 6, 2026 10:12 AM PT

Last updated April 6, 2026

‘Apple’ Review: Reinvention Incorporated

Tech empires rise and fall so quickly that the mind can hardly conceive of one lasting half a century, but it’s true: In 1976, two 20-somethings named Steve (Jobs and Wozniak) asked their 41-year-old mentor, Ron Wayne, to file the paperwork that created Apple Computer.

Like most people who reach midlife, Apple has a complicated history. The path from a bunch of young people assembling computers in a Silicon Valley garage to the international titan it is today was far from linear. Early successes in helping define and popularize the personal computer were followed by a troubled adolescence that almost proved fatal. That crisis moment created the opportunity for a storied rebirth, setting Apple on the trajectory that has made it one of this century’s most profitable and valuable companies, currently valued near $4 trillion.

“Apple: The First 50 Years” (Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books) tells the stories that lie behind dozens of Apple’s tech creations. David Pogue has seen many of those years up close, having written for Macworld magazine before becoming a columnist for the New York Times and a correspondent for PBS’s “Nova” and “CBS Sunday Morning.” Apple’s successes are famous, but Pogue doesn’t steer away from discussing the dead-end products and corporate malfunctions. While tech media tends to focus on hot new products and strong personalities, Pogue’s book is resolutely a biography of Apple Inc. itself—one of the most distinctive characters in American business history.

In the early days, Silicon Valley was still full of fruit orchards and Apple was far from the carefully styled corporate behemoth it became. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were a perfect (if unlikely) match. Mr. Wozniak performed a series of technical miracles while designing the components of the earliest Apple computers. Meanwhile, Jobs tapped his innate marketing sensibilities to start selling computers preassembled in friendly plastic cases. This decision made the devices far more appealing to consumers who would never think of building one out of component parts.

Early Apple computers worked like all computers at the time: Users typed in commands via a keyboard. Just as the Apple II was taking off, however, Jobs and other Apple employees (most notably Jef Raskin) became inspired by inventions being created at research labs such as the nearby Xerox PARC, whose staff was building devices with entirely different interfaces. These computers let a user guide a pointer with a mouse, clicking on interface elements and selecting commands from drop-down menus.

Popular myth might suggest the Mac was born full-fledged from Jobs’s brow, but as Pogue details, the truth was much messier. A different Apple computer, the Lisa, had a windowing interface but was so expensive that it had been an overnight flop. Raskin’s Macintosh team was working on building a much simpler and cheaper computer—but Jobs took over the project and kicked Raskin out. Jobs redefined the Mac as a smaller, constrained riff on the Lisa, and that design is what made its debut in a Ridley Scott-directed commercial during the Super Bowl in 1984 and changed how people thought computers should work.

Pogue does not spare any details about the trouble the company went through in the 1980s and ’90s. Jobs was ousted in 1985 by the chief executive he recruited; he started NeXT Computer, purchased Pixar and only returned to Apple when the company was on the brink of running out of money.

These days the corporation doesn’t like to draw attention to that interregnum period, but anyone who believes it was a complete wasteland will be surprised by the numerous successes discussed here, including the PowerBook, which defined the design of modern laptops, and the Newton MessagePad, a handheld computer that was the butt of jokes at the time but now can be seen as a decade-too-early forerunner of the iPhone.

A big problem was that early Mac sales success cloaked some of the severe technical problems that almost led to the company’s failure. Most notably, it struggled to produce a modern multitasking operating system to replace the Mac—and eventually had to buy NeXT to acquire one.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Apple’s tiny user base was mostly at universities and in the art and design departments of various firms. Only upon Jobs’s return in 1997 did the company undertake a strategy that would make it appeal to a much larger audience. Apple almost immediately introduced the bulbous and translucent iMac, a hit product that gave the company the necessary cash flow to survive until he could transform the entire business. It’s about as dramatic a business narrative as you could think up.

If Jobs’s return to Apple isn’t the pivot point of the Apple story, that title probably belongs to the introduction of the iPod in 2001. Apple’s pocket music player largely owed its existence to one fortuitous meeting Apple executives had with the maker of a tiny hard drive that didn’t seem to have any practical application. As Jon Rubinstein, then a hardware executive at Apple recounts: “They go, ‘Hey we’ve got this thing. We don’t really know what to do with it.’” But Apple’s team, Pogue writes, knew that “a hard drive the size of an Oreo” would be the perfect platform for a portable music player, and they negotiated exclusive access to the drive.

The iPod broke out of Apple’s traditional markets, became a mainstream hit and drove customers into Apple’s newly opened retail stores. Improved Mac sales followed. Most of all the iPod led Jobs to consider a future where Apple did not merely make personal computers but also produced small, hand-held devices.

Pogue doesn’t limit himself to the creation myths behind the biggest products. After the iPod, there was an iPod Mini, an iPod Nano and an iPod shuffle. Readers less enrapt about the details of these might find themselves skimming sections about them, or those about operating-system updates and later iMac models.

The book’s sweet spot is probably the 2007 introduction of the iPhone, the groundbreaking smartphone that remains the core of Apple’s business. This device was the perfect combination of different projects at Apple, including a touch interface that was originally intended to drive an iPad-like tablet. But the handheld form factor of the iPod, among other factors, influenced the decision to make a phone instead.

Jobs’s decision to forgo the physical keyboard that was standard at the time, thanks to the popularity of BlackBerry devices, was risky: Engineers kept trying and failing to build usable software-based keyboards but couldn’t get one that met Jobs’s exacting standards. (Modern iPhone users frustrated with how easy it is to make mistakes on the keyboard would be horrified by some of the original approaches illustrated in the book.) In the end, they figured it out. Apple’s business exploded with the introduction of the iPhone and the App Store, with annual sequels that increased market share and profits.

As Pogue moves closer to the present day, the candid observations of people involved in building these products begin to fade. The Apple of the second Jobs era was much more tightly guarded than in the wild early days, and many of the main characters still work in the industry, including at Apple. (Pogue did speak on the record with several current employees, an unusual degree of cooperation for Apple—though those recollections are largely anodyne, honed through years of public-relations training.)

The author does leave room for some of the company’s post-iPhone triumphs: The iPad was Apple’s last significant product whose design was driven by Jobs before he died in 2011, and more than 15 years after its introduction, the tablet still is the definitive product in its category. The company’s wireless AirPods headphones may at first have seemed “shockingly weird,” as Pogue writes, but these days it’s more notable when people opt for wired models instead.

The era of Jobs’s successor, Tim Cook, is hard to grasp from a historical perspective. Surely there are many great anecdotes about the creation of the Apple Watch, Vision Pro and the rise of Apple’s in-house chip-design group, all of which will come out when the principals involved have retired. Mr. Cook’s era will mostly be known for its relentless drive toward efficiency and an increased focus on subscription services, which do well for the company’s bottom line but might make for fewer delightful tales told out of school.

To write a biography of a corporation that has lived numerous lives in its 50 years is a huge task, and Pogue’s easy style fits with the enthusiastic culture that has surrounded Apple’s products from the very beginning. While the stories from the ’70s and early ’80s might be familiar to readers of other Apple-focused histories, Pogue was right to include them as a part of this definitive history.

Perhaps for some far-off future anniversary of the company, a book may come along to tell the true story of Apple’s past 15 years of product development. Who knows how many more lives Apple might have lived, and how many more hit products it will have launched, by then?

[Originally published in The Wall Street Journal.]

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