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🍎 The Rise of Apple — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 4: Stealing the Future On the last night of 1983, a single television station in Twin Falls, Idaho, ran a strange sixty-second film just before midnight. Almost nobody saw it. That was the point. Apple's agency, Chiat/Day, slipped the ad onto KMVT at the last possible break of the year so it would legally qualify for the 1984 advertising awards. The real audience was still three weeks away — and roughly ninety-six million people strong. The ad that only aired once On January 22, 1984, during a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on CBS, Apple aired "1984" to the nation for the first and only time. Conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and creative director Lee Clow at Chiat/Day, produced by Fairbanks Films, and directed by Blade Runner 's Ridley Scott, it borrowed its nightmare wholesale from George Orwell. Rows of grey, shaven drones shuffle throu...

🍎 The Rise of Apple — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 3: Going Public By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a hit computer, a landmark IPO, and a problem it could not code its way out of: nobody actually knew how to talk to a computer. You typed cryptic commands at a blinking prompt, memorized syntax, and hoped. The machine sat there, patient and useless, until you spoke its language. The great leap of the early 1980s was not a faster chip. It was teaching the computer to speak ours — and the ideas that made that possible were sitting, largely unused, in a research lab a few miles from Apple’s door. The lab that invented the future and forgot to sell it Xerox — the copier company — had opened the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in 1970. Its mandate was loose and its budget generous, and the result was one of the most astonishing runs of invention in the history of technology. In 1973, PARC engineers fin...

🍎 The Rise of Apple — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 2: The Apple II By the autumn of 1980, Apple was no longer two guys and a soldering iron. It was a real company shipping the Apple II by the hundreds of thousands, with a headquarters in Cupertino, a professional CEO in Mike Scott, and a chairman—Mike Markkula—who had bet his own money and his Intel-honed instincts on the whole thing. The next logical step was the one that turns a startup into an institution: selling shares to the public. What nobody quite anticipated was that the offering would go down as the loudest financial event in Silicon Valley’s short history, and would mint a generation of millionaires in a single afternoon. The offering that sold out in minutes On December 12, 1980, Apple Computer went public. Underwritten by the blue-chip house Morgan Stanley alongside the scrappier tech specialist Hambrecht & Quist, the offering put 4.6 million...

🍎 The Rise of Apple — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 1: Two Steves in a Garage In April 1977, in a rented booth at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, two Steves showed off a beige plastic box that didn't look like anything else in the room. Most of the machines on the floor were kits — bare boards, exposed wires, toggle switches, the kind of thing you soldered together on a weekend. The Apple II had a molded case, a keyboard, a power supply that didn't hum or cook itself, and, when you plugged it into a color television, it drew pictures in color. It went on sale that June. It would still be selling, in one form or another, sixteen years later. The Apple I had been a board for hobbyists — you supplied your own case, keyboard, and power. The Apple II was the opposite bet: a computer an ordinary person could carry home, plug in, and switch on. That shift — from hobby to appliance — is the whole st...

🍎 The Rise of Apple — a 20-part series. See all parts » On April 1, 1976 , three men signed a partnership agreement to sell a hand-built circuit board to hobbyists. One of them would become the most famous entrepreneur of his generation. One would become a beloved engineering folk hero. And the third would sign away the greatest fortune in business history less than two weeks later — on purpose. This is where Apple begins: not with a product launch or a grand vision, but with a soldering iron, a sales pitch, and a decision that still makes people wince fifty years later. The engineer and the salesman Steve Wozniak — "Woz" — was the genius. A 25-year-old Hewlett-Packard engineer who designed circuits for fun, he had built something remarkable in his spare time: a single-board computer that plugged into a keyboard and a TV and actually worked. In an era when a "computer" meant a fridge-sized machine or a kit of loose parts you assembled yo...

How did two twenty-somethings building circuit boards in a Los Altos garage — a company that fired its own founder, then nearly went bankrupt without him — become the first business on Earth worth three trillion dollars? This is The Rise of Apple , a 20-part series tracing the whole arc: from the Apple I and the Macintosh, through Steve Jobs's exile and triumphant return, to the iPod, the iPhone, the App Store, and the Apple Silicon and AI era. A new part publishes regularly — bookmark this page to follow along. The full series Part 1: Two Steves in a Garage — 1976: Wozniak's board, Jobs's hustle, and the third founder who walked away Part 2: The Apple II — 1977: the machine that turned a hobby into an industry Part 3: Going Public — 1980: the IPO that minted a generation of millionaires Part 4: Stealing the Future — Xerox PARC, the mouse, and the graphical interface Part 5: 1984 — The Macintosh, the Super Bow...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 19: The Year of Efficiency For most of its life, Facebook was a company defined by the products people touched every day — the feed, the like button, the blue app on a billion phones. But by 2023 the story that mattered most was happening somewhere users never saw: in racks of GPUs and the weights of neural networks. The company that had spent a decade collecting the world's social graph decided to give something away for free. In doing so, Meta rewrote the rules of the AI race — and eventually bet the company's future on winning it. The gambit: give the weights away On February 24, 2023 — just months after ChatGPT had made large language models a household phenomenon — Meta AI announced LLaMA, a family of models built by its research lab under chief AI scientist Yann LeCun. The pitch was contrarian. While OpenAI and Google guarded their models behi...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 18: Becoming Meta By the start of 2022, Meta looked untouchable. The company that had renamed itself just months earlier was worth more than a trillion dollars at its peak, its family of apps reaching billions of people every day. Then, on February 3, 2022, the floor gave way. Reporting fourth-quarter results the day before, Meta revealed something it had never disclosed in its history: Facebook's daily active users had actually shrunk quarter over quarter. Pair that with Apple's App Tracking Transparency changes gutting ad targeting, TikTok siphoning off younger users, and a jaw-dropping spend on the metaverse, and investors panicked. The stock cratered roughly 26% in a single session, erasing about $232 billion in market value — at the time, the largest one-day loss in U.S. corporate history. The long slide of 2022 That single day was only the beginning. Across ...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 17: The Antitrust Reckoning On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stood in front of a camera — part keynote, part science-fiction trailer — and told the world that the company he founded in a Harvard dorm room would no longer be called Facebook. The app would keep its name. The corporate parent that owned Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger would become Meta Platforms, Inc. "We are a company that builds technology to connect people," he said. "The metaverse is the next frontier." It was the biggest identity change in the company's 17-year history, and it arrived at the strangest possible moment. Just weeks earlier, former employee Frances Haugen had leaked tens of thousands of internal documents — the "Facebook Papers" — and testified to Congress that the company knew its products harmed teenagers and amplified division. Critics saw the rebrand...