Without Apple, no Uber, Doordash nor camera in pockets

Happy birthday Apple!

Apple turns 50 on April 1, as you may have heard, and the anniversary is getting lots of well-deserved attention.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs set out to change the world, and they really did, probably way more than they ever dreamed back then. Let’s take a minute to think about what they pulled off, by either introducing or popularizing life changing products.

Say goodbye to text-based commands

Remember C colon/? and prompts like that? We used to use them to navigate our way through computers. Really! Apple changed that, by introducing the concept of graphical interfaces via windows and popularizing them, following the introduction of the mouse, which they lifted from Xerox, but made mass market. It would be a year later for the concept of windows to really take off, when Microsoft introduced the Windows software.

1,000 songs in your pocket

I used to spend hours making mixtapes, in real time, by recording songs from CDs to cassettes, that I would then listen to on my Sony Walkman. Then came Napster, free music and digital music players to listen to them, from the likes of Rio and Creative Labs. But they weren’t very good, or popular. That changed with Apple’s iPod, where you could store your entire library on one little machine. Within a few years, CDs started disappearing from the shelves of Best Buy and Target, because consumers stopped buying them. The iPod was that popular.

The biggest revolution was the iPhone

And the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. Blackberry and Palm had them. But again, they weren’t very good, most people paid little attention to them and most were very happy with their flip phones.

The iPhone was Apple’s biggest revolution. Without the iPhone, the computer in our pocket, there would be no Uber, no Doordash, no Venmo, no instant translation with an app, no texting, no booking hotel rooms on your phone, and we’d still be lugging our big cameras with us on vacation.

Yes, others, like Nokia and Sharp had decent digital cameras built into phones, as early as 2002. And the first iPhone in 2007 had a camera, but it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t until 2010 when the first decent camera showed up on the iPhone 4, and didn’t become a real competitor to the traditional camera until the release of the iPhone 15 Pro model in 2023.

If I had told you when the iPhone was introduced, that there would be a time when the photo quality on a phone would be so good it would kill the digital point and shoot camera market? That people like me would be able to use it to film episodes of a TV show on a little cellphone camera? That I never would have to lug a big camera bag with me on vacation!

You’d have said I was crazy.

Thank you Apple!

But what have you done for me lately?

The iPod and iPhone (plus the first iPad) were all in Steve Jobs era. Many say Apple hasn’t created anything insanely great since he died in 2011.

To that I say yes and no. The iPhone of today is spectacular and so much improved from the early days. AirPods are in most people’s ears wherever I look, it’s hard to go to a restaurant and not see servers taking orders on modern iPads, and the Watch has taken on a life of its own. It began as a device to tell time, and morphed into a health accessory that can also tell if you fell and track your heart. (And for us photo nerds, act as a monitor to help us compose and snap our iPhone shots remotely.)

Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t a product guy, but he’s done a great job inspiring his engineers to continually make the old products better. (And seen the company’s revenues nearly quadruple from just over $108 billion in annual revenue to nearly $400 billion today.

So what if the $3,000 Vision Pro was a total bust, and few people seem to care about the HomePod speaker?

Apple’s Next 50 Years

Apple’s gotten a lot of knocks about not being up to date with AI and is playing catch up, slowly with Google and Samsung, but frankly, I don’t think the consumer really cares.

The iPhone is so good, it doesn’t need AI. Even if Apple finally comes up with a chattier, smarter, more responsive Siri digital assistant, as has been promised for years, it won’t change things. People wouldn’t ditch their old iPhones for a better Siri. With Gemini and ChatGPT so good, we’re covered. (Apple says it will fold Gemini into Siri later this year, so that could be something to look forward to.)

Apple is reportedly planning to introduce a dual screen foldable phone that would expand the size of an iPhone to iPad length, and boost the price up to $2,000. I find this questionable. Samsung has been trying to entice consumers to this format for 7 years, with little success, because as cool as the phones look, they’re too expensive. If anyone could popularize the format, it would be Apple, but I smell another flop on its hands, like the Vision Pro. $$ That’s why.

It is also said to be working on smart glasses for the day when people don’t care about the iPhone. Fine and dandy, but as cool as the Meta Smart Glasses are, I’m not seeing these as a mass market item that could ever replace the iPhone.

You know what–we still care about Macs 50 years later, and I dare say we’ll still be using iPhones in 2076.

What do you think everyone? Can you imagine ditching your phone for glasses you could speak to and interact with?

Let me hear from you!

(Kudos to author David Pogue for bringing lots of attention to the big birthday with his new book about 50 years of Apple. I haven’t read it yet, though I look forward to it, and have loved watching his interviews to plug the book.)

In other tech news this week:

—Apple wants us to update our iOS software, which it says will help us fight back against hackers. PSA: Open your phone, go to the Settings app, click General and look for Software Update. You want to see iOS 26.3.1. If you have something earlier, click the update and get protected.

—Amazon just jacked up the rates again to watch Prime Video without ads, to an extra $5 monthly on top of the yearly $139.99. (Somebody had to pay for Amazon to come up with $75 million for the Melania movie, right?)

The best way to let Amazon know you object is to decline to pay, and refuse to watch. In his Cord Cutters Weekly newsletter, Jared Newman says he won’t be paying, as Amazon is shifting to a focus of sports over TV shows and movies, and those events will have ads, whether or not you pay the Amazon no ad tax. I’m not paying either. You?

—Don’t get me started on vertical videos, which have their place on social media, but only in small doses. As a filmmaker, I want to be as wide screen as possible and see it all. On the Oscars the other night, host Conan O’Brien did a great bit about this.

—Samsung ditched its Tri-Fold phone after just three months of sales. Yup, that’s another bomb in the foldable category. Could the $3,000 price tag have anything to do with it?

On the Road Again, 2026!

We’ve got a big travel year ahead of us—Monday we’re on Catalina Island, Bakersfield and Las Vegas trips are coming up, followed by a return to Paris, Italy and the backroads of Indiana and Kentucky.

Huge thanks to our Photowalks partners at Best Western and Scripps News for making this all possible.

Where would you like to see us go in 2027? Yup, we’re booking that far ahead!

Sunday’s episode, FYI, brings us to Atlanta, where we’ll be exploring with Scripps anchor Holly Firfer. The show debuts at 10 a.m. ET.

Thanks as always for watching, reading and listening!

Jeff