Apple Turns 50
As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, I wanted to reflect on the role it’s played in my life over the years.
Apple turned 50 on April 01, 2026. Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, it has grown from a scrappy, outmatched upstart into one of the most valuable and recognizable brands in the world.
But that was not always a given. Apple nearly went bankrupt in the late ’90s, and had it not been for a $150 million investment from, of all companies, Microsoft, the Apple we know today might never have existed.
My first visit to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop in 2010.
Wherever your journey with Apple products began, whether with the Apple I in 1976, the Macintosh in 1984, the iPod in the 2000s, or the first time you picked up an iPhone, few would argue that there has always been something captivating about using Apple’s technology. And so, on the occasion of Apple’s 50th anniversary, it felt like as good a time as any to reminisce and reflect on my own journey with Apple, and the many ways it has shaped my life along the way.
My journey with Apple began with a Blue Dalmatian iMac G3 in my junior high shop class. Whether my teacher saw me as a hopeless case destined never to master the tools in that room, or simply noticed how completely I had fallen for that Mac, I will never know. What I do know is that I spent hours in front of it, filming little projects, tinkering with audio, and making things for the joy of making them. Long before I understood why, it was the first time I experienced the ability to create on a computer rather than be told to use one.
iPod shuffle.
That early infatuation eventually turned into my first Apple purchase: the third-generation iPod I bought at the start of high school. With a 90-minute bus ride to and from school each day, I spent countless hours slumped against the window, half-asleep, listening to whatever angsty teenage music felt like it understood my life best. I still remember the flutter in my chest when I got to share an earbud with my crush and the times we spent at lunch listening to music together. And I remember spending far too many hours in iTunes building playlists, all legally obtained, of course, for studying, for sleeping, for trying to woo said crush, and inevitably for crying when our three-week relationship came to an end.
My first Mac: the incomparable 12-inch PowerBook G4. Equipped with a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 512MB of DDR RAM, an 80GB 5400-rpm hard drive, a DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive, and a 1024 × 768 display.
As much as the iPod became part of my daily life, it also dragged me further into Apple’s ecosystem, and eventually led to my first Mac, the 12-inch PowerBook G4. I have owned an “I’d rather not say” amount of Macs since then, but the 12-inch G4 remains one of my favourite and most memorable computers to this day. At the time, it felt unlike almost anything else on the market. It ran a beautiful operating system, looked stunning, and somehow managed to feel both impossibly compact and remarkably capable.
Excitedly installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009.
Most importantly, it scratched that creative itch I always had. On the Mac, I effortlessly burned hundreds of mix CDs for my iPod-less friends, edited photos in iPhoto, spent way too many hours using CandyBar to customize my system icons, journaled, and designed in Photoshop. The PowerBook was always at the ready to help me take the ideas bouncing around in my head and turn them into something real.
My MacBook on the morning I prepared to defend my master’s thesis.
Throughout university, the Mac and iPod remained a formidable duo as I slogged through course after course over half a decade to earn my degree. At the time, I was using a 15-inch MacBook Pro alongside a first-generation iPod nano. Together, they carried me through every paper and presentation. The Mac was where the work got done, while the iPod played the soundtrack that helped me stay awake during all-nighters, get fired up before exams, and enjoy the guilty pleasure of occasionally listening back to some of those angsty songs from my teenage years.
Capturing mundane moments became so much easier following the launch of the iPhone. I have thousands of photos capturing subtle details about my life over the past two decades that I never would have captured otherwise.
Perhaps the most significant change the iPhone brought to my life when the iPhone 3G arrived in Canada in 2008 was giving me a convenient way to capture memories. By today’s standards, early iPhone photos were nothing special. The original iPhone camera was, to put it kindly, pretty rough. But that was never really the point. Their value to me was not in how sharp they were or how impressive they looked. It was in what they captured. The iPhone made it easy to start preserving the smaller moments too: my study setup, little moments that caught my attention, and the ordinary details of my life that would otherwise have slipped away.
But beyond any single product, one of the things I came to appreciate most about Apple over the years was the creative world that seemed to exist around its platforms. The apps made for the Mac were not only useful, they were beautiful too. There was a quiet care to the experience, a level of craftsmanship that seemed to extend into nearly every detail. And I think that rubs off on a person. Because when you are surrounded by beautiful, elegant, thoughtful designs, I like to think you get inspired and start to think about the things you create a little differently too.
Essentially locked inside for months during the COVID-19 pandemic gave me an allowance of time to create in a way I've never had access to before.
In a lot of ways, all of that had been building toward something. The COVID pandemic was perhaps the first time that I truly had a truly unlimited space to create in. In the years leading up to it, life always felt like it was moving week to week. I was focused on getting my licensing hours, managing clients at the clinic, preparing to get married, moving, and handling all the usual adult responsibilities that gradually fill every spare corner of life. But when COVID hit, so much of that momentum suddenly stopped. Locked inside for months on end, I found myself with a once-in-a-lifetime abundance of time, and out of that quiet stretch came BasicAppleGuy.
I finally had the time and focus to bring together my love of writing, my passion for design, and my admiration for all things Apple into a persona, a social media presence, and a website that is now entering its seventh year. It has been a privilege to carve out a space where the three things I care most about can work in harmony together. Maybe that is part of why this all sounds so affectionate in retrospect.
Now, I know this reads like I’m a big homer for Apple. Fair enough. I would fail trying to defend it. They are, after all, a company that had an S-tier charismatic CEO, an incredible design team, and a best-in-class marketing machine, all working together to build one of the most compelling brands in the world and, apparently, turn me into a sucker for their products. And yet, even with all of that being true, some of the most meaningful moments of the past couple of decades have still happened with those products by my side.
Creating on the Mac.
At the end of the day, it was never really just about the devices themselves. It was about what they made possible. The things I got to create, the moments I was able to capture, and the parts of myself I slowly came to understand along the way. If Apple’s first fifty years were spent building hardware and software, then my own story has always been about what I was able to build with them.
