Gadgetory

I feel bad for the iPad we can't make it five hi I'm Walt Mossberg executive editor of The Verge and today is the 40th birthday of what I think is the most influential technology company of the last 20 years Apple Inc and let me talk about some of the Apple products that change not only Apple but society and the culture the Apple to the Mac the iPod and the iPhone so this is one of the many Apple 2 models over that long period that the Apple 2 was made you'll notice this is that this was the original Apple logo which was in six colors people who were Apple fans just say I believe in six colors and this is the Apple to see and to our eyes it looks like it should be a laptop being kind of a heavy laptop but a laptop it weighs about seven seven and a half pounds and it was and it came out by the way ironically the first year the same year is the Mac and one of the things that I think is interesting about this that I think for tells a lot of what Apple did was this had no slots but the Apple we know today where everything is sealed up I think this might have been the first indication of it because there were no slots in this instead they built in the functions of those cards and they had ports on the back board and you know that became common also particularly in laptops but this member this is a test up computer for a company that really pioneered they didn't invent the computer the personal computer but they certainly popularized it and the company that did that their financial success was I mean they were blown out of the water by Microsoft in that period when you think about the computer product that Apple makes it's the Mac the Mac was the computer that pioneered the interface that every computer uses now which is you know the mouse or trackpad later and the you know graphical interface with drop-down menus and icons of me that nobody thinks twice about that today but that was so different when they when they did the Mac that they was just laughed at I mean the other computer companies laughed at it and Microsoft adopted the same graphical user interface for Windows about a year and a half after the first Mac came out but it was more of a more of a layer on top of what they had whereas Apple built a whole computer based around it and I'll tell you what my favorite Mac is one and it's this which is much later than 1980 five or six this is the MacBook Air it's extremely common lots of people have them lets people see them every day I think this is the best laptop ever made and I think that because not only the fabulous stickers it has on which are not standard they're optional but when Steve Jobs introduced this in 2008 he got up I was by then a technology columnist and I was at the event and he stood up on stage and took out he carried out one of those interoffice manila envelopes with the red string at the top you know and it didn't look there was nothing didn't look like was bursting at the seams or anything strange about it he just undid the thing and he pulled your laptop out of the envelope I got a call or an email from him saying when are you coming out to the valley next and I said I think whatever I said a few weeks or a month he said what do you think he could come a little sooner I have something I want to show you and I said okay and I came a couple weeks later and and he always put he showed me a proctor he would always put it under cloth even though it was only it was only a few of us in the room and I was the only one who had never seen it so I put it under cloth but in fact I used to tease him about me sage I just like to do it this way and it was a black cloth he pulled it off and it was the iPod and the iPod is what made apple begin to explode and become the Apple that now on their 40th anniversary we know as this highly innovative highly intriguing hugely influential tech company this did started that the iPod was a big big deal culturally and in every other way and there were people that wanted two things they wanted a widescreen iPod and they wanted a phone built into it and Jobs decided he decided to do both on one device Maketu it was that he had engineers who came up with the ten finger multi-touch thing we have now but they came up with it in a tablet size so essentially they started to work briefly on the iPad before they started work on the iPhone so I get this phone call from and he says we're having an event we haven't announced it yet but we're having an event I really it would really be important to me if you came and I said well when is it and he said he gave me the Dana said Steve it's in the middle of CES I've always a point it's I'll be in Vegas I can't be in San Francisco you're vetted wall I'm telling you this is going to be the biggest thing since the Mac you are going to want to be there Steve Jobs decided he was going to introduce the iPhone in the middle of the Consumer Electronics Show in January and I remember saying to him afterward why did you announce and it blew CES out of the water the iPhone announcement blew see yes or no one talked about anything else in the tech world everything else it was a NASA CES was just drowned out and while I certainly will never forget the many private conversations I had with him which included by the way a lot of gossip and theorizing about things and where things were going was going on at this company and why did they do this Apple instead of this other way and him arguing with me whatever those were all great but I but I think you know the irreplaceable moments are are the ones where he was on stage doing that stuff this is the original iPhone that went on sale in June of 2007 so I did not see this before it went on stage unlike some other things but I decided to give these the three journalists to review and but they broke was all kinds of restrictions but you know you were not supposed to be seen with it and whatever you know so I was walking from the hotel to the TV studio and I had this on my ear and I walked by an 18 t store who knows where the 18 t stores are in New York or anywhere else right this was at the somewhere on the Upper East Side there was a little 18 t store on the corner and there was a lordy a line of 50 people because the thing was I think going on sale that night or something like that and as I approached it and I'm talking my wife people start yelling at me some of them recognize me and they were saying Walt come on over here and show us this thing what do you think of it can we look at can we hold it you know and it was like no I just had to cut him I phone completely changed the mobile phone industry it completely changed the carrier industry because Apple had power before the iPhone the carriers had all the power if you were a company that made a phone you had bow to the wishes of Verizon or AT&T in the United States or their counterparts in places like Europe because they would control they had the bigger brand than you did but Apple had a bigger brand than the carrier and Jobs was uncompromising I would say this about Apple when you take all this together I think they have been the most influential company of any kind of the last 20 years certainly if you look over their 40-year existence when you consider that they were the first to popularize the personal computer and then they were the first to commercialize the method by which you use a personal computer the graphical user interface and then they went on to do all these other things they've probably been the most influential a company overall although it's especially the last 20 years the color of it you look at the back of it I think it's pink I don't like it but I don't like the gold gold either I think it's just too