📱Apple's 50 Years Dominance

I was late to the Apple club, only using my first iPhone, an iPhone 6, in 2017. In Lagos, the phone wave hit us like a tsunami. In the circle that I found myself, Apple products were not always the go-to. Expensive phones like that were only for the fathers of the richest kids.

But something switched in our psyche as we approached the middle of the last decade, splitting all Nigerian youths into two: iPhone lovers and iPhone haters. Later, the MacBook too became popular, further cementing this dynamic, fitting us into cool and uncool kids.

Suddenly, Apple products had become common, appearing in Instagram photos, alongside wads of cash and bottles of expensive spirits. I had only bought my iPhone 6 as an experiment. Let me see what Apple has to offer. I was hooked. Since then, I have only ever used the iPhone. When I finally got my first Mac years later as a writer at a tech media website, five minutes of testing the device, I knew it would ruin my life. I have since become drunk on the Apple ecosystem.

I have chosen Apple offerings over the years because, to me, their utility is not a mirage. It seemed to me, for the first time, a company sold a product that could do what it advertised and do it well.

When we talk about the Apple ecosystem, somehow we forget that that was not always the case. The batteries didn’t last as long as they were advertised, that fingerprint unlock didn’t always work well, that our phones got tired and hung a lot. It was why people drank the Kool-Aid until it was all it was: Kool-Aid.

This week, as the company turns 50, we look at 50 of the most defining, most innovative products in Apple’s history.

— Dennis, Managing Editor

Read now:

The 50 Most Innovative Apple Products Ever, Ranked