Apple and Me: The First 50 Years

Five stories from 50 years

Apple was founded on April 1, 1976. That makes today its 50^th birthday.

I’ve been prepping for this day for two years, working on my book Apple: The First 50 Years. Or, as I like to refer to it, my New York Times bestselling book Apple: The First 50 Years.

Actually, I’ve been prepping for this day for 42 years, because that’s how long I’ve been writing about this company.

“I read your book,” wrote a reader recently. “But did you mean to edit out your own role in Apple’s history?”

Yes, I did. I’ve had many interactions with Apple over the years, a couple of which were minorly newsy. But I thought it would be distracting and/or self-aggrandizing to insert myself into the narrative.

(In fact—now it can be told—I even quoted myself a couple of times in the book without revealing my identity. Here’s one example:

Jobs held up a standard interoffice envelope and pulled out of it the thinnest laptop in the world: the MacBook Air. It was little more than a thin aluminum wedge, an airfoil. “This thing looks as if it’s descended from a spatula,” wrote the New York Times tech critic. “When it’s on a table, you might mistake this laptop for a placemat.”

Yup. That was me.)

Today, as the world explodes with articles, videos, and posts about Apple’s first half century, I’m contemplating my own Apple history: A few key moments that shaped my relationship with one of the most successful, controversial, influential companies on earth.

My introduction

Truth is, I was never a computer guy. I was a musical-theater nerd and a magician. The only reason I bought a computer is that I was about to graduate from college, and a buddy pointed out that we would lose our chance to buy a Macintosh for half price.

(Apple’s University Consortium was a discount program that wound up spawning a million Appleheads. It was ingeniously conceived. Because, you know: If you became a Mac nut as a student, you’ll probably be one your whole life.)

I vividly remember opening the beautiful white box in my dorm room and lifting out the cute little Mac by its built-in handle. (A handle!)

(Shown here: An original 1984 Mac and 2024 me, at a Computer History Museum event. Thanks to Jonathan Leblang for bringing the Mac!)

I turned it on. The screen was bright and sharp, but it showed only a blinking question-mark icon. This was the world’s easiest to use computer?

The instruction manual said that my first step should be to “insert an application.”

A what?

I literally began rooting through the contents of the box again, looking for this missing part. I know how dumb that sounds today, but c’mon—nobody had ever heard of application as a computer component. Apple made that term up.

At that moment, I felt the shame of being an outsider, a doofus who couldn’t figure out his machine. That day, I realized that even Apple assumed too much technical knowledge.

Seven years later, I would write Macs for Dummies—a book for people like the 1985 me.

The upgrade

Steve Jobs hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn’t want them polluted by modifications.

That’s why the first Mac had no slots and no expandability. That’s why the first iPod wasn’t available for Windows. That’s why the first iPhone had no app store. You used the 16 apps Apple gave you, and you were happy.

But for all Jobs’s genius, closed systems were his Achilles’ heel. The Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone became hits only after Apple opened them up.

In the fall of 1985, I’d moved to New York to pursue a career on Broadway. I loved running music software on my half-price Mac, but this thing was gasping for memory. The longest document you could write in MacWrite was ten pages.

So when I heard about a guy selling unauthorized memory upgrades, I took the bait.

This dude met me in the lobby of my apartment building, late at night; in my memory, he was literally wearing a trench coat. The whole thing felt illicit; Jobs felt so strongly about closed systems that if you so much as opened your Mac’s case, you instantly voided your warranty.

I handed the guy an envelope with $400 cash, and he handed me a clear static-proof plastic bag containing the RAM upgrade kit.

To this day, I still remember the bootleggy thrill of that Upper West Side handoff.

Jobs calls

Steve Jobs was always sensitive to his depiction in the press—and if he didn’t like something you wrote, he’d let you know.

In 2007, Apple introduced iMovie ’08—a complete rewrite of the video-editing program, cleaner but stripped of its advanced features. “All visual effects are gone—even basic options like slow motion, reverse motion, fast motion, and black-and-white,” I wrote in my New York Times review. “Call it FlyMovie, or ByeMovie, or WhyMovie. But one thing’s for sure: it sure isn’t iMovie.”

Jobs called me that night, furious. “You have no idea what the fuck we do here at Apple, do you?” he said icily.

He told me that my use of iMovie to build short films, with background music and crossfades, was passé. “We have data. We know how people are using iMovie. And they’re not editing home movies they shot with their camcorders. They just want to whip together some clips and post them on YouTube.”

“But Steve,” I complained. “I have 100 tapes I was planning to edit into little movies—and now I can’t do that anymore!”

“I’ve got news for you,” he said. “You’re never going to edit those videos. You’ll never have the time. They’re going to sit in your drawer.”

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” I said, irked at his presumption.

Ten years later, I had all those tapes digitized, so that they’d be ready to edit when I had the time.

That day still hasn’t come.

Jobs calls, part 2

When the iPhone was about to go on sale in 2007, a thousand people lined up around the block at New York City’s Apple Store.

I’d written a parody of “My Way,” with the crazy idea of filming a music video with the participation of people standing in that line. It was a total blast; everyone in line was game. I edited the results together and uploaded it—and for six hours, ladies and gentlemen, it was the most watched video on YouTube. (It's still there.)

Anyway. That night, I got a call from Jobs’s assistant. “I have Steve on the line,” she said. “Can you take the call?”

I was out to dinner with my family, but I said yes.

“David?” Jobs said when he came on the line. “I saw that song video you posted today.”

Oh GREAT, I thought. I steeled myself for another epic reaming by the CEO of Apple.

“I just wanted to say, it was the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

I almost dropped the phone.

The Pogue Feature

When I was writing iPhone: the Missing Manual in 2007, I had a serious problem: How was I going to illustrate the thing? As you may (not) remember, there was no way to take screenshots on the original iPhone.

I knew that Apple had some way to capture screen images, because they showed up in all of Apple’s marketing materials. So I called Apple PR to ask: Would they be willing to share their screenshot tool with me?

The answer was no. Apple’s tool, Screenshotter, was for internal use only. It had no polished user interface and was never intended for normies to use. Apple couldn’t risk having it loose in the wild.

But I wasn’t completely out of luck. “If you’re willing to come out to Cupertino, we can arrange for you to use Screenshotter in one big capture session, under supervision.”

Well, that was one way to solve it! I booked my flight.

And then I got another call. “Actually, Steve says he’s uncomfortable with the idea of you using our tool at all,” the PR guy said. “So we’d like to propose a different idea: Send us a list of the screenshots you want for your book. Describe each one in detail: What app you want visible, what data is on that screen. And we’ll have someone here make the shots for you.”

Incredibly—to me, anyway—that’s what happened. I sent a spreadsheet that described 400 screenshots to Apple. And some poor anonymous Apple designer spent months of 2007 setting up and snapping all 400 of those shots. They were, of course, gorgeous.

A year passed. Apple prepared a new iPhone model; I prepared a new book edition. It would need all new screenshots.

Once again, I called the Apple PR guy.

But he’d learned his lesson. “We’re not doing that again,” he laughed.

“We’ve decided we’re just going to build a feature into the iPhone that lets anyone capture screenshots. Internally, we’re calling it the Pogue Feature,” he said.

And to this day, you can take a screenshot by pressing the Volume Up and Sleep buttons simultaneously.

Much later, by the way, at a Macworld Expo, I finally met my mysterious Apple graphics assistant. As a thank you, I shipped him a box of gourmet ice cream pints.

In fact, he’s still at Apple. I just heard from him yesterday, in fact. He was about to join thousands of other Apple employees for Paul McCartney’s private concert at Apple Park.

End of the ride

Today marks the end—well, an end—of a once-in-a-lifetime journey. Writing this book about Apple involved 150 interviews, chasing down the rights to 360 color photos, and traveling the country to root through archives. It also involved very long days and very short nights writing, rewriting, and then trimming the resulting 600-page book. It involved sending individual chapters out to 300 kind-hearted beta readers, who took responsibility for hunting down any remaining typos and bugs.

Finally, it involved a thrilling month-long book tour.

All of it, in principle, was in the name of celebrating, honoring, and examining this milestone: The 50th anniversary of Apple.

As we walked back from a bookstore event, my wife Nicki held my hand. “How do you want to celebrate?” she said. “I think you should treat yourself to something self-indulgent. Get a new laptop. Get a new car!”

When I really thought about it, though, there was only one thing I wanted: Some Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream.

We found a gas station that had some. Together, we ate the whole pint on our way home.