Apple is turning 50 today and it doesn’t look a thing like its younger self
From Macs to iPods, iPhones, and now services, here’s how Apple’s business has looked every 10 years.
Around half of startups in the US disappear within five years, just a third survive a full decade, and only about 13% make it past 30 years — with new tech companies faring even worse on average. One name in the space, however, has made it to its 50th birthday today, growing from a scrappy computer maker run out of a garage in California to a $3.7 trillion behemoth.
For its first ~20 years, Apple was essentially a one-product company, with its annual reports through the mid-1990s and into the early 2000s consistently stating that “substantially all” of its net sales had been derived from personal computers and their related software and peripherals.
It wasn’t until a few years after the turn of the century that Apple, barely recovered from near bankruptcy, started making money from things that weren’t the Mac. Following the launch of the iPod in 2001 and its iTunes Music Store in 2003, Apple’s music business generated $9.6 billion in sales by 2006, or roughly half of the company’s total revenue.
The era of the iPod didn’t last all that long though, as the iPhone’s debut in the summer of 2007 quickly rendered the music player obsolete. By 2016, the iPhone alone made up nearly two-thirds (63%) of total company sales, while the Mac, iPod, and other products that once defined Apple contributed just ~15%.
iVolution
Fast-forward another decade, and Apple remains an iPhone company… at least in most people’s minds. In reality, the company has been slowly trying to reduce its reliance on physical devices in favor of recurring revenue streams, with its Services segment — the non-product side that includes the App Store, advertising, iCloud, AppleCare, and Apple TV+ — generating over a quarter of total revenue and running at a roughly 75% gross margin. That’s more than double the 37% margin that the iPhone and other physical products deliver.
At a time when Big Tech names are racing to outspend each other on chips and data centers, Apple hasn’t been riding the AI wave in quite the same way, nor splurging nearly as aggressively. Still, the iPhone maker has seen its best-ever year and a record quarter for smartphone sales, even as its AI system, Apple Intelligence, has yet to prove itself in earnest. Whether that changes by Apple’s 60th birthday, or what the company will look like more broadly by then, is anyone’s guess.
