# Transcript: Featured Session: David Pogue on Apple’s First 50 Years **Date:** March 18, 2026 · 10:30 PM **Session:** [Featured Session: David Pogue on Apple’s First 50 Years](/sessions/2026-03-18/pp1150099-featured-session-david-pogue-on-apple-s-first-50-years) ## Summary Author David Pogue interviews Apple Fellow Phil Schiller about Apple's 50-year history, exploring the company's remarkable turnaround from near-failure to becoming a $4 trillion company. Schiller shares personal stories about joining Apple in the 1980s after being inspired by the Macintosh, his rise through the marketing ranks, and his close working relationship with Steve Jobs, revealing the human side of Apple's product development process. ## Topics `apple history` · `steve jobs` · `phil schiller` · `product marketing` · `corporate turnaround` · `apple products` · `technology leadership` · `mentorship` ## Key Takeaways 1. Apple's 50-year journey represents the greatest corporate turnaround in history, growing from near-bankruptcy to a $4 trillion market cap with 2.5 billion users worldwide (31% of global population). 2. Phil Schiller's role as SVP of Worldwide Marketing went far beyond traditional marketing—he was involved in product strategy from 'cradle to grave,' participating in original product concepts through launch alongside engineering and design teams. 3. Steve Jobs was not just a demanding boss but also a mentor and friend who took personal interest in his team's lives, offering career guidance and family support while pushing them to achieve more than they thought possible. 4. Schiller's path from a statistical analysis role in Massachusetts to Apple executive demonstrates the power of product passion—he joined Apple after experiencing the Macintosh firsthand, willing to take any job just to be part of the company. 5. Apple's success formula includes simplicity, beauty, elegant design, making the whole widget, focus on very few products, and deep commitment to customer experience—principles that have remained consistent across five decades. ## Full Transcript So 360 full color pictures from the archives. An amazing, amazing experience. So we are gathered here to celebrate Apple's first 50 years. Just to let you know where we're at right now, at this moment, two and a half billion people are carrying around Apple's products, if you do the math, that is 31% of the entire global population. If they were a country, they would be the largest on Earth. They would be bigger than China, bigger than India. Apple sells 220 million iPhones a year. They take in a million dollars of revenue every 90 seconds. So in the time I've been standing here, they've out earned all of you put together. They were the first company in the world to hit a trillion dollar market cap, and then 2 trillion, and then 3 trillion, they're approaching $4 trillion. So if you wanted an easy mnemonic for tracking the 50 year history of Apple, I've made a slide for you. It's basically that. So it's the rise, the fall, and the rise again. It is, I would argue, the greatest turnaround story in corporate history. So it's Apple I, Apple II, Macintosh, Steve Jobs is out. PowerBook, Newton. Steve Jobs is back. iMac, iPod, iPhone, Tim Cook takes over. Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro and the services. Thank you, and good night. So yeah, so that's what we're going to talk about. In a nutshell, during those 150 interviews I conducted, there was one guy who stood out. He has been at Apple during most of that arc for coming on 40 years at Apple. He witnessed the down times. He witnessed the up times. As a bonus, he's an incredible storyteller, has a steel trap memory for all of this, and he was at the table for the creation of all these historic products. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my privilege to introduce Apple Fellow, former Senior Vice President of Global Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller. This is really cool, because you don't normally get to be free range like this, do you? No, for good reason. But you were gracious enough to give me two interviews for the book, and both of them were just so full of humor and stories and insight. I find you a philosophical executive—like you can talk about what Apple has done for the world, and you told me crazy stories about both the dark times and the bright times. So let's start from the beginning. What brought you to Apple the first place? The products. So I'm sorry, these stories always get very involved. So I was working in Massachusetts for a management consulting firm called Nolan Norton Associates in Lexington, Massachusetts, and I was in charge of the statistical analysis infrastructure, the database infrastructure. I built in a voice data network that was cutting edge at the time, a remote email system—no such thing. And this was 1986 and 1985. And so that was my job. My coworker was responsible for the client side computing, mostly publishing presentations—Sharon Gordon. And Sharon said, we've got this incredible new thing, it's called a Mac, you have got to try it out. I create dBASE databases, I do SAS analysis. That's a toy. You got to try it out. And this went on for about a half a year. And finally, I got to play with it. And like many of us, the light went on—oh my goodness, this is something I've never seen before. So I did what any entrepreneurial young person would do. I contacted the salesperson at Apple in our local Massachusetts office and said, I'll do any job. Just give me any job. I want to be a part of this company. I want to learn all about this. I'm excited. And they said, well, we've got in our Marlboro Massachusetts office a brand new job created by Bill Campbell and his team, called a technical marketing support representative—a brand new thing. You can come and do it. So I did. I joined Apple in Massachusetts. I was responsible for three markets: business, education and value added resellers across six states—New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island. And that was my first day. And I started at Apple. And from that moment to two years later, I was on stage with Scully at Monterey at TED II, helping do a presentation on the future of hypertext media. And that's the dream, right? The dream is join this crazy, wild company, change the world and get to do things you never imagined you could do. And this I learned during our interview, you rose to Worldwide Marketing. Head—to me, that suggests that you were in charge of marketing, right? But it turns out that job is much more involved. I mean, you helped decide things about the products. Yeah. First of all, I'm the anti-marketing marketing guy. I took no business classes. I had no marketing expertise. I learned it on the job at Apple, doing every kind of marketing job in the field, in corporate, enterprise marketing, multimedia marketing, education, everything I could learn. So I learned on the job. And at Apple, I mean marketing—for those of you, how many of you do marketing? Anybody out there? A few hands. So you all know this, marketing isn't one thing, right? Marketing is many different jobs, and the big buckets at Apple are Product Marketing, Marketing Communications, and Corporate Communications, which is PR. So product marketing, we're responsible for the products, the roadmaps, messaging, the business around the products. Corporate communications, the PR team and at that time, also the events team. And marketing communications—they're the ones that create the advertising and the websites and the graphics and product photography and all that work. So three very different disciplines. And so I was product marketing, product strategy, product direction, all of that, until over time, I got to run the others as well. But I see—so you were in the conversations about like, "No, Steve, I don't think this phone should have no keyboard," like you were there for those arguments. Yes. So product marketing—at Apple, we call it cradle to grave. So we work on the original concepts of the products, side by side with the engineering team and the ID team all the way through launch of the products, the management of it, with sales and finance team, till eventually we end of life products. So start to finish, you're involved in every phase of the product. Gotcha. And so what I'd love to know is, you know, I interviewed 150 people. I got 150 versions of Steve Jobs. Like, some people are like, he had a cruel streak, like he was mean for its own sake. And then there's this other philosophy that's like, no, no, no. He just was impatient for product greatness. And if he thought that you could rise above the level you were at, he would let you know, and I'm sure it was to get better work out of you. So where is the truth? Well, I'm sure it's different for all of us, but I had an amazing relationship with Steve. We were friends. He was my mentor. He was my boss. We worked together every single day for 15 years. We traveled the world together on work trips, and he was nothing but amazing and wonderful for me and truly was a mentor. He would include me in every meeting. He would give me more projects to do than I thought I could do myself. And he was always right about it. He would take time to show me how to do things a better way or whatever. And he was—I used to tease him that he wanted to be dad-like. He would take a personal interest in my family's life and what we were doing. He wrote a recommendation for my son to get into high school. He gave him advice on where he chose when it was a tough choice of where to go to college. He was our friend. There are a couple aspects of Steve that I find, I found in the research were kind of left out of the common depictions. One, he was freaking hilarious. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-18/pp1150099-featured-session-david-pogue-on-apple-s-first-50-years)