A nostalgic look at Apple’s iconic products

Lately, I’ve been dreaming of the past. I’ve been dreaming of simpler times — simpler only because I was younger, and for no other reason. I’ve been dreaming of the naivety that comes with seeing something for the first time, feeling something for the first time.

In short, I’ve been dreaming of Apple. I’ve been dreaming of the iPhone.

Now, you might question the validity of my statement, and it’d be a reasonable doubt (sorry, HOV, I’m stealing your album name). Let me tell you two words, however: Steve Jobs.

 

How Steve Jobs transformed Apple’s brand with revolutionary marketing

Being born in ’95, whenever I heard “apple” growing up, I’d assume whoever spoke the word was referring to the fruit. Needless to say, that wouldn’t last long.

For me, the year I started associating the word Apple with the brand was 2005. That year, the 5th-generation iPod was released. 40,000 songs in your pocket, 40 hours of music playback — that must be how I got hooked on repetition and alliteration.

I was ten and I wanted the iPod, yet I couldn’t have it; I had to pluck it from my brother’s night table while he was away, hide it from my mother’s watchful eyes, and wait for her to leave the house before I could finally listen to music on it. I wonder now if they named the company Apple as a biblical reference; if perhaps they knew the craving their young audience would have for the products would be akin to that of Adam and Eve.

 

From iPod to iPhone: the evolution of Apple’s game-changing innovations

Late ‘90s and especially early ‘00s were the defining years of Apple. The return of Steve Jobs as CEO in ’97 and the launch of the iPod in 2001 paved the way for Apple to become the cult-like company we know today, worth trillions of dollars. But how did a single human being achieve all that? The answer can be found in this interview he gave on December 19, 1991 — six years after resigning from Apple and founding NeXT Computer.

Verbatim, he says: It’s funny, the group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. […] and yet, if you ask people on the street which products have the best reputation for quality they will tell you the Japanese products. Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don’t form their opinions on quality from marketing. […] They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products, or the services, and so one can spend enormous amounts of money on marketing, one can win every quality award there is, and yet if your products don’t live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. […] we need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services.

 

Why Steve Jobs’ focus on quality over marketing defined Apple

In these few sentences lies the entirety of Jobs’ philosophy and approach to work: products first. While this may sound like the negation of marketing itself, it’s actually quite the opposite: Jobs understood the importance of marketing and recognized its fundamentality in the making of an everlasting brand — he did, however, see it as nothing but a tool, a way to put their superior products under the spotlight.

However, when he went back to Apple in ’97, the company was in a horrible state: the stock price was $0.16 (down 35.3% for the year), there were rumors rumors of IBM buying it out, and Stan Dolberg of Forrester Research (in a very Gen Z fashion, btw) was quoted by the New York Times saying “Apple as we know it is cooked. It’s so classic. It’s so sad.”.

 

Think Different: how Apple’s most iconic ad changed brand marketing forever

First order of business The think different ad: one of the most recognizable and iconic pieces of brand marketing campaign in the history of advertising, and yet the product was still at the center of it. Nothing was shown; nowhere in the ad do they talk about any Apple products — and yet, with a simple sentence spoken during the presentation of the campaign, the connection between company (and what it stands for, as the campaign focuses on values) and product is placed in your head with no chance of ever leaving it: […] It honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living — some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t as you’ll see — you’ll know… that if they ever used a computer, it would’ve been a Mac.

 

iPhone’s groundbreaking impact: how Apple redefined technology

We have to talk about iPhone. Well, we have to talk about the iPhone — the one the world saw on January 9, 2007. The OG.

This was two years after I discovered Apple: the iPod I told you about had been passed down to me at that point, and I was on vacation. Once I got back to Turin, my brother was picking me up at the train station. I remember he was sitting on a bench with earphones on. I went up to him, he looked at me, smiled, got up, took the earphones off, and he brought out of his pocket this device. He just said “It’s an iPhone”, unlocked it, and started showing me stuff on the screen. I was flabbergasted because how do you operate a phone without no buttons? I felt like I was watching something off of Minority Report or The Matrix. I had a new craving.

 

Steve Jobs’ vision: the power of product-first marketing at Apple

With a minimal presentation that’s not unlike a powerpoint slideshow, Steve Jobs - as he himself stated - revolutionized the tech world for the third (and last) time.

The marketing was at a minimum here, dialed all the way down to almost zero, and the focus was purely on the product itself. So much so, that Apple decided to bring other brands and their phones into the discussion — a move that they haven’t pulled since, for two reasons: firstly, they’d gain nothing nowadays by comparing themselves to someone else. The entirety of their cult-like approach to marketing and branding would collapse in doing so, and reminding you that competition indeed exists and is thriving. Secondly, if you’re comparing your product to someone else’s, you’d best know for certain that what you’re offering is vastly superior in every way, shape or form to what others are putting on the market; otherwise, you’re just gifting your competition with free advertising.

 

Life after Steve Jobs: Tim Cook, Apple’s future, and the innovation gap

Since Steve Jobs’ departure in 2011, Apple stocks have been surging, making it the first ever company to be worth a trillion (yay, capitalism!). It’s not too farfetched to theorize that his untimely death played a major role in solidifying his myth and skyrocketing the company into the upper echelon of brands, akin to what happened with most well-known painters and their work. Tim Cook’s guidance has been - surprisingly, to some, as he had some enormous shoes to fill - adequate, albeit uninspired. He religiously followed the release schedule Jobs provided the company with and did his best to ensure the development of the projects that the former CEO left behind, like the AirPods, the Apple Watch and Apple Silicon. None of these products, however, were even remotely as groundbreaking as the Macintosh was in ’84, or the iPhone was in 2007, and that leaves us all wondering what we could have had if Steve Jobs were still alive.

 

The quest for future innovation: can Apple find the next Steve Jobs?

All we know is that Steve Jobs considered the iPod launch in 2001 a pivotal moment in tech history, and that was exactly seventeen years after Macintosh was released. Today is exactly seventeen years since Apple launched the first iPhone, and all we know for sure that the iPhone 16 hasn’t fundamentally changed anything since the first one. And - unlike what Steve Jobs so boldly and convincingly stated in 2007 - Apple products are not five years ahead of its competitors.

What a difference a single human being can make. To quote the Think Different campaign from ’97: “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”. Here’s to hoping Apple can stumble into another one of those people.