Name: Apple at 50: How the iPhone maker revolutionized tech | Terms of Service
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The second conditional

If I asked you what one company has had the biggest impact on personal technology, on the gadgets we use, the services available on those devices, the culture around tech, what would you say?

Apple revolutionized personal computers, phones and more.

And as today's guest David Pogue writes in his new book talk, 27% of the world's population now uses Apple products.

That means if Apple users were a country, it would be the most populous in the world.

As the company turns 50 years old this year, I wanted to take a look back at how Apple came to have such a huge influence in all of our lives.

So I invited David Pogue into the studio.

David is a CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and best selling author whose new book Apple the first 50 years paints a detailed picture of that history.

My conversation with David, coming right up.

Before we really get into the book, you have been writing about Apple for over 20 years now.

You were actually in college when the first Macintosh came out.

What was it like for you when you first experienced Apple's technology?

That was really my introduction to technology.

But I mean I, I was like a musical theater nerd in high school.

But this thing was so beautiful and so powerful.

I mean, many of your viewers are too young to remember, but in 1984, computers were command line.

You would memorize commands, you'd have to type them with punctuation.

They may or may not have had a screen, right?

Computers until the Apple 1 and Apple II did not even have screens or keyboards.

You used flippy switches and little lights to read the output.

But the Macintosh was completely different.

It was the first time the masses had a mouse and menus so you didn't have to remember the commands and windows that overlapped and you could copy and paste and little icons that represented your pieces of paper.

But at the time it was revolutionary and opened up using computers to vast new realms of people.

For people who might not realize the full picture, just give us an overview of how influential and powerful Apple is now.

Well, until AI came along, it was the most valuable company in the world in terms of its total stock price.

They make a million dollars every 90 seconds.

Stat from the book While we've been sitting here, Steve Jobs revolutionized the marketing of technology.

The design of technology, the simplification.

And also Apple didn't invent the CD drive, the DVD burner, WI fi, the touchscreen phone, the tablet.

All those things came before the laser printer, the personal network, but Apple introduced them all.

So Jobs thing was being able to spot fledgling new technologies that were really cool but really complicated and not there for everyday consumer use, and

simplifying them and beautifying them enough that they could release it to everybody.

Right, Apple, I mean, Apple products obviously are so popular.

Could you talk a little bit about why you think it's important for folks, for users to look back at the history of this company?

First of all, to understand how Apple got where it is, it helps to understand its culture.

And to know its culture, you have to look back to where that came from.

And it came from these two dudes, the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, who met Woz was in college and Jobs was in high school four years behind him.

And they both had similar outlooks in terms of they wanted technology no longer to be the realm of governments and corporations and computer nerds.

They wanted it to be an appliance for everybody, which was a weird thought in the 70s.

I mean computers, the best thing you could get was a mini computer which is the size of a microwave oven.

And these guys insisted that someday everyone would have a personal computer.

You talk about the two Steves, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak.

Most people, I think associate Apple with the iconic founder Steve Jobs.

Love you Woz, but you actually start the book with the story of Steve Wozniak.

Well, because the story began with Steve Wozniak.

So Woz was a member of this local computer club in what we now call Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, where all these nerds would go and they had this post 60s us against them.

Passion to bring computing to the masses.

And of course that was Woz's thought from the very beginning.

He made what we now know as the Apple one.

No one remembers it, it wasn't even in a case, it was just a circuit board for hobbyists.

But from the beginning, Woz created the technology and Jobs wanted to sell it.

Jobs wasn't entirely non technical, he was into electronics, but

nothing like Woz, who was just a savant with circuitry.

So the Apple one and then the Apple ii, which of course was the computer that introduced the public to home computing.

I mean, that thing sustained Apple for 10 years while they experimented with a bunch of failed machines.

So really, Woz was the backbone of Apple's first 10 years.

You make the point in the book that much of what Apple is, what it has been, can be traced back to Steve Jobs.

And how did that influence Apple's culture?

Jobs is depicted often as this raging tyrant who would just rip you apart if he didn't like your work.

I think what all that misses is that there are really three Steve Jobses.

So there was a Steve 0.0, as Woz calls it, when he was in high school, and

he teamed up with Woz and they were friends.

They talk about girls and music and technology and culture.

Then Jobs, very early twenties, very young, was thrust into the position of being a multimillionaire running this gigantic corporation.

Never finished college, never had any training in managing or working with people.

And then he got kicked out of Apple in 1985 in part because of his temper and his intolerance.

then in 1996, Apple bought him, brought him back to the company, and

He had started Pixar, he had started next.

He had more experience in companies and working with people, and

he was a much more evenly balanced human being when he came back.

Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, just sort of broadly, it's sort of rare to see the founder of a tech company remain the CEO of the tech company for as it matures.

Probably in part because of this thing like when you're 20 and you're starting a company, you don't know how to run a multibillion dollar company.

And it's even weirder if you think about it.

Apple, even as it became a many, many, many billions of dollar company, existed primarily to execute the ideas of Steve Jobs.

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