Microsoft turned 50 last year and spent most of the celebration explaining how it survived its own irrelevance. IBM marked the same milestone in 2011, deep into the long retreat from hardware dominance that had defined its first half-century. Fifty years in technology is usually the point where a company finds out whether what made it great was a moment or a model, and whether the instincts that built the first era can survive contact with the second.
Apple reaches that mark on April 1, sitting above $3 trillion in market capitalisation, with an installed base of over 2.5 billion active devices and a services business generating nearly $100 billion a year.
Last year, Eddy Cue, the man who runs that services division, said during testimony in a U.S. antitrust case that artificial intelligence could make the iPhone irrelevant within a decade. The comment moved through the news cycle and disappeared. That is the more honest place to start thinking about what this anniversary actually means.
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Last updated: March 24, 2026
