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🍎 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...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 16: Hauled Before Congress For most of its life, Facebook had grown by buying its way out of trouble. A scrappy photo app looked like a threat? Buy it. A messaging service was pulling in a billion users? Buy that too. For years, this was celebrated as visionary dealmaking. On December 8, 2020, the United States government reframed those same deals as the evidence in an antitrust case — and asked a court to undo them. The complaint that named a strategy On that day the Federal Trade Commission, joined by 46 states, the District of Columbia, and the territory of Guam, filed suit against Facebook. A separate coalition of attorneys general, led by New York's Letitia James, filed its own parallel case the same week. The core accusation was blunt: Facebook held an illegal monopoly in personal social networking , and it had defended that monopoly not by building better produ...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 15: Cambridge Analytica On the morning of April 10, 2018, the most powerful man in social media put on a dark suit and a blue tie, walked into a Senate hearing room, and sat down on a black leather chair that aides had quietly raised with a booster cushion. Cameras stacked three deep on the floor in front of him. Forty-four United States senators sat in a horseshoe above him. Mark Zuckerberg, who had built Facebook in a dorm room fourteen years earlier, was now there to answer for it. He would spend nearly ten hours over two days under oath — the joint Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on the first day, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the second. Roughly a hundred lawmakers took turns. It was the closest thing the internet age had produced to a public reckoning, and it had been building for a long time. How Facebook ended up in the dock The immediat...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 14: The Oculus Bet For most of Facebook's first decade, the story was about growth — more users, more revenue, more of the world wired into one social graph. In March 2018 the story flipped. For the first time, the question everyone was asking was not how big Facebook could get, but what it had quietly let slip out the back door. The answer had a name that would haunt the company for years: Cambridge Analytica. A quiz, a loophole, and 87 million people It started innocently enough — a personality quiz. In 2013 a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan built a Facebook app called “This Is Your Digital Life.” It presented a survey, paid users a small sum to complete it, and promised the data was for academic research. Around 270,000 people installed it and clicked allow . That should have been the end of the exposure — 270,000 cons...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 13: WhatsApp for $19 Billion By early 2014, Facebook had spent a decade perfecting the art of capturing attention on screens people already owned — the desktop browser, then the smartphone. So when Mark Zuckerberg wrote a $2 billion check for a company that made a clunky headset you strapped to your face, the reaction ranged from confusion to outright ridicule. Facebook didn't just buy a product. It bought a bet on what would replace the smartphone entirely — and it has been paying for that bet, in cash and in credibility, ever since. A garage, a Kickstarter, and a legend The origin story of Oculus is almost too clean. In 2011, an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey was building virtual-reality headsets in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. He had assembled what was reportedly the largest personal collection of head-mounted displays in the world, and he...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 12: Betting Everything on Mobile On the evening of February 9, 2014, Mark Zuckerberg invited Jan Koum over to his house for dinner. Ten days later, Facebook announced it was buying Koum's company, WhatsApp, for roughly $19 billion — the largest acquisition in the company's history, and one of the biggest tech deals ever struck. For a messaging app with no advertising, no games, and barely fifty employees, the number seemed almost absurd. To understand why Zuckerberg paid it, you have to understand what he was actually afraid of. The man who signed the deal outside a welfare office Jan Koum's story is the kind Silicon Valley likes to tell about itself. Born near Kyiv in 1976, he emigrated to Mountain View, California with his mother and grandmother at sixteen. The family relied on food-stamp support and lived in a small subsidized apartment; Koum swept floors at a gro...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 11: The IPO That Flopped On February 1, 2012, Facebook filed the S-1 paperwork that would take it public. Buried in the risk factors, past the boilerplate about competition and regulation, sat a sentence that should have terrified anyone paying attention. The company admitted it did "not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products." Its users, meanwhile, were fleeing to their phones by the millions. Here was the most valuable social network on earth, about to stage one of the largest IPOs in history, quietly confessing that it had no real business on the fastest-growing computing platform of its generation. The desktop web that Facebook had been built on was slowly emptying out. The future was a five-inch screen, and Facebook was barely there. The Bet That Burned Two Years The mistake had a name inside the company: HTML5. Rat...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 10: Buying Instagram For eight years, Mark Zuckerberg had said no. No to Viacom's reported $750 million in 2006, no to Yahoo!'s $1 billion the same year, no to the very idea of being anyone's public company. "We are definitely in no rush," he told the world in 2010. But rules are rules: once Facebook crossed 500 shareholders of record, the SEC's disclosure clock started ticking, and a private company forced to report like a public one might as well be one. On February 1, 2012, Facebook filed its S-1. On May 18, 2012, it rang the Nasdaq bell. And within weeks, the most anticipated technology offering in history had become a cautionary tale. The biggest debut Wall Street had ever seen The numbers were staggering by design. Facebook's prospectus reported 845 million monthly active users and 2.7 billion daily likes and comments. Demand was so heavy that underwriters — le...

📱 The Rise of Facebook — a 20-part series. See all parts »  |  « Part 9: Move Fast and Break Things By the spring of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had spent almost a decade learning a hard lesson about the internet: the thing that kills you is rarely the competitor you can see. It is the small, fast product your users quietly fall in love with while you are busy running a giant. On the evening of April 5, 2012, Zuckerberg found himself staring at exactly such a product — a photo-sharing app called Instagram, barely eighteen months old, with thirteen employees and not a cent of revenue. Four days later, he agreed to buy it for a billion dollars. A tiny company with a terrifying growth curve Instagram had launched on October 6, 2010, the work of two Stanford graduates. Kevin Systrom — a former Google engineer who had once turned down a job offer from Zuckerberg and interned at Odeo, the startup that became Twitter — had built a clunky check-in app cal...