Apple at 50: David Pogue Dismantles the Myths

In 1996, a NeXT employee named Garrett Rice contacted Apple with a proposal. Apple needed a new operating system. NeXT had one. Perhaps they should talk.

Rice had not asked his boss, Steve Jobs, for permission. His initiative helped open the negotiations that brought Jobs back to the company he had co-founded. Rather than reprimanding him, Jobs sent him a check for $20,000.

For a man famous for wanting to control everything, it was a useful result from something he had not controlled at all.

Such episodes give David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years much of its appeal. Published in March ahead of Apple’s 50th anniversary on April 1, the 608-page history draws on 150 interviews, including conversations with Steve Wozniak, John Sculley and Jony Ive. Pogue, a former New York Times technology columnist and CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, follows the people who built the products as closely as those who introduced them onstage.

Along the way, he dismantles some familiar Apple myths. Others turn out to contain just enough truth to have survived decades of retelling. The garage was real. Jobs really was driven out of running Apple. But neither story happened quite as it is usually told.

The garage was not the workshop

The important workplace in Apple’s beginnings was Wozniak’s cubicle at Hewlett-Packard. He returned after dinner to design and build his computer using the equipment there. Jobs’s family home provided an early base, but its garage was not where the Apple I was conceived. Wozniak had been saying so for years before Pogue’s book.

Nor was Apple the pair’s first attempt at business. Pogue counts it as their fourth. One earlier venture involved “blue boxes,” illegal devices that let users make free long-distance calls. Wozniak built them; Jobs found buyers. On one memorable occasion, Wozniak called the Vatican pretending to be Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the pope. He did not get through.

There was plenty of evidence that Wozniak needed a commercial partner, and perhaps occasional supervision. A fake bomb planted at school earned him a night in juvenile detention. When people seeking Pan Am reservations dialed his similar telephone number, he amused himself by offering improbable itineraries.

When he developed his computer, his first instinct was to distribute the designs free to fellow enthusiasts at the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs noticed that not everyone who wanted a computer could build one. There might be money in doing some of the work for them.

A third man helped turn that observation into a company. Ronald Wayne, a 41-year-old colleague Jobs knew from Atari, drew up the partnership agreement and received 10 percent. He also designed Apple’s first logo, an elaborate drawing of Isaac Newton beneath a tree.

Twelve days after the agreement was signed on April 1, 1976, Wayne withdrew. The partnership’s debts could expose his own assets, and he had already experienced a business failure.

His departure became a staple of stories about spectacularly costly decisions. Yet even the famous $800 payoff needs care. At Pogue’s March 11 book launch, Wayne said he had withdrawn from the partnership rather than negotiated a sale of his stake. Jobs later mailed him an unsolicited $800 check, which he jokingly described as “a cheap tip.” A further payment subsequently settled his remaining claims.

Wayne was protecting himself from potential debts, not cashing out of a fortune. The fortune was still imaginary.

The people behind the genius

Jobs was not Apple’s first chief executive. He did not originate the Macintosh project, either. That began with Jef Raskin, who proposed an inexpensive, easy-to-use computer and gave it its name. Jobs took control of the project and pushed Raskin out.

The familiar story of Apple simply taking the graphical interface from Xerox also leaves out much of the work. Apple’s visits to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center were arranged in exchange for an investment opportunity. Turning what its engineers saw into a usable consumer product required years of experiments and testing.

One of the best episodes belongs to Bill Atkinson. Working with severely limited memory, he struggled to make overlapping windows redraw cleanly when a user moved one aside. He thought he had seen Xerox demonstrate the solution, so he kept working until he found his own.

The correction came in an unlikely setting. In Atkinson’s recollection, he was sitting in a hot tub at a nudist camp when a Xerox researcher congratulated him. Atkinson said it had taken him weeks to reproduce what Xerox had done. The researcher explained that they had not solved that particular problem. Atkinson had misremembered the demonstration.

Believing the answer already existed had helped him find it.

Much of Apple’s celebrated simplicity came from watching people struggle. Test users tended to blame themselves when an interface confused them. After several people made the same mistake, the engineers knew where the fault lay. They changed the software.

What happened when Jobs left

Jobs helped popularize the bluntest version of his own departure. “And then I got fired,” he told graduates in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

In 1985, however, Apple’s board backed Sculley in their power struggle and removed Jobs from operational control. Jobs remained chairman, increasingly isolated, in an office he called “Siberia.” He resigned that September. His letter complained that the reorganization had left him with nothing to do and no access even to regular management reports.

That was hardly a friendly separation. But being stripped of power and subsequently resigning is not the same sequence as being dismissed on the spot. Pogue restores the distinction without making the humiliation disappear. The resignation letter was printed, fittingly, on an Apple LaserWriter.

A decade later, Apple had a different problem: it could not deliver the modern operating system it needed. Its Copland project consumed roughly $250 million and the work of 500 engineers before being abandoned. That failure made Rice’s unauthorized approach from NeXT valuable.

Apple agreed to buy NeXT in December 1996 and completed the acquisition in February 1997. Jobs was coming back, although the welcome offered little sign of the polished performances ahead. At Macworld in January 1997, chief executive Gil Amelio presided over a rambling presentation that ran for about three hours. The event intended to celebrate Apple’s future instead advertised its confusion.

The recovery also owed something to a product often treated as an embarrassment: the Newton handheld computer.

To develop it, Apple had invested in ARM, the British chip-design business. The Newton disappointed commercially; the investment became valuable. Apple began selling ARM shares in 1998, after Jobs’s return. In fiscal 1999 alone, those sales brought in $245 million.

The Newton had not become the hit Apple wanted. It had left the company an asset it could sell while rebuilding the business. The years without Jobs had helped supply the means of recovery under him.

The advertisement he hated

Once back in charge, Jobs cut through Apple’s sprawling product plans. He also needed to persuade customers and employees that the company still had a reason to exist.

“Think Different,” the advertising campaign that supplied the answer, was not his invention. The line and the black-and-white portraits came from Craig Tanimoto, an art director at TBWA/Chiat/Day. Rob Siltanen wrote the original “crazy ones” script; Ken Segall later refined it.

Jobs’s initial verdict on the script was brutal. “It’s advertising agency shit!” he told Siltanen. Eventually he changed his mind. Richard Dreyfuss delivered the narration that aired, although Jobs recorded a version himself.

The campaign became inseparable from Jobs’s public identity. Its actual authorship is a reminder of how easily the person who approves an idea comes to be remembered as the person who created it.

There was a more playful side to his showmanship. To celebrate the millionth iMac, Jobs wanted to hide a golden ticket inside its box. The customer would receive the computer free and a trip to Cupertino, where Jobs would conduct a tour dressed as Willy Wonka, complete with top hat and tails. Apple’s lawyers stopped the plan over sweepstakes rules.

He did enjoy a less elaborate celebration. In 1997, Michael Dell said he would shut Apple down and return the money to shareholders. When Apple’s market value overtook Dell’s in 2006, Jobs emailed employees to remind them that the rival executive’s prediction had not aged well.

The name on those computers had caused trouble, too. The Beatles’ Apple Corps fought the company over its trademarks for years. Under their 2007 settlement, Apple Inc. acquired the relevant trademarks and licensed some back to the music company. The financial terms remained confidential.

The fish tank, the phone and the App Store

There are enough peculiar, well-supported Jobs stories without relying on the doubtful ones.

Take the iPod prototype supposedly thrown into a fish tank. As the story goes, engineers insisted they could not make it smaller. Jobs dropped it into the water, pointed to the escaping bubbles and told them there was still room inside.

It neatly turns his impatience into a lesson in engineering. Pogue rejects it: he found nobody who could substantiate the episode. He also rejects the tales of Jobs summarily firing employees he had just met in an elevator. Removing those stories does not make Jobs an easy boss. It removes some of the folklore built around a difficult one.

The development of the first iPhone offers more revealing material. Apple’s touchscreen experiments began with a tablet. Another approach tried to turn the iPod into a phone, but entering text with its click wheel was painfully cumbersome. The touchscreen work offered a better route. The tablet was set aside while Apple built the phone.

The smoothness of later iPhone launches can obscure how much argument went into deciding what the original product should do. Jobs initially opposed allowing outside developers to write apps for it. He feared bad software would spoil the experience.

His alternative was extraordinary. He and software chief Scott Forstall would spend a weekend listing every application anyone might need. Apple would then hire the programmers to build them all.

Forstall agreed to the meeting, then told his team to start building an App Store. He expected Jobs to come around. When Jobs finally did, the work was already under way.

The man who could see a future in which people typed on glass had needed persuading to let other people decide what they might do with it.

On smaller matters, his attention could be exhausting. Eddy Cue’s proposed title for a memoir was Off by One Pixel. Jony Ive, meanwhile, disliked the mismatch between the curves of iPhone icons and those of the device itself. When software design came under his authority, he changed them.

A company, not a monument

Forstall also remembered a different Jobs. When he was seriously ill in hospital, his boss arranged for an acupuncturist to visit him late at night. The colleague who had learned to work around his boss also remembered his concern when he was sick.

Pogue does not have to excuse the cruelty to include the kindness. Nor does restoring credit to engineers and advertising writers diminish the difficulty of what Jobs accomplished. It makes that accomplishment easier to understand: he depended on people who could endure his criticism, improve his ideas and, occasionally, disregard his instructions.

Apple’s later experiments could be just as ungainly. An early Vision Pro prototype weighed about 50 pounds and needed a mechanical arm to support it. Even at Apple, a finished product’s elegance could begin with something nobody could sensibly wear.

There are limits to the perspective. Pogue has covered Apple for decades and openly acknowledges his admiration. The company provided access to employees and its archive, though it did not receive the manuscript before publication. This is principally an inside history, rich in the memories of people who made the products. It should not be mistaken for the whole experience of everyone who manufactured, bought or competed with them.

Its most useful correction is nevertheless a substantial one. Apple’s history was not a plan unfolding exactly as its founder intended. People misunderstood demonstrations, abandoned projects, changed their minds and made calls they had not been authorized to make.

Jobs himself understood the danger of turning his judgment into a permanent rule. Before his death in 2011, he told Tim Cook not to keep asking what Steve would have done. He invoked Disney’s difficulty moving beyond its founder and urged his successor to exercise his own judgment.

“Just do the right thing.”

Apple: The First 50 Years, by David Pogue. Simon & Schuster, 608 pages. Published March 10, 2026.