A Turning Point
On April 1, 2026, Apple celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Three weeks later, after serving as Apple’s CEO for fifteen years, Tim Cook announced his resignation — handing the reins to John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering.
The company, now valued at nearly $4 trillion, is once again going through a transition of power.
Everyone is asking: what does Apple’s future look like?
Looking back on my own four years here, I’ve been asking a different question: What is it, exactly, that made Apple what it is?
Not Technology
People often call Apple a tech company. But that answer clearly falls short. If technology alone were enough, there would be many Apples in the world by now. There aren’t.
At the iPad launch in 2011, Steve Jobs said:
Technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our heart sing.
To me, this is Apple’s core value: Apple is in the business of human experience. Technology is the means; how people feel is the point.
Apple’s former Chief Design Officer Jony Ive put it even more concretely in a recent interview:
I believe that when somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, they thought, “Somebody gave a shit about me.”
That feeling — of being cared for — isn’t a feature or a spec. It’s just a feeling.
It comes from whether every detail has been treated with seriousness, whether every interaction was designed for you.
That’s Apple’s essence: not building the most powerful technology, but crafting the best experience.
A Prophecy from 1983
Once you understand that core, a particular passage becomes remarkably interesting.
It’s 1983, at the International Design Conference in Aspen. The first Macintosh hasn’t been released yet.
A 28-year-old Steve Jobs stands on stage and describes a machine he’s imagined:
The problem was, you cannot ask Aristotle a question.
I think as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or underlying set of principles, or underlying way of looking at the world… then maybe someday after this person is dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me.
And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.
Jobs was saying that maybe, in 50 to 100 years, we’d invent a machine that could capture the intellectual essence of a person — so that future generations could continue the conversation.
Notice he didn’t say “the most powerful search engine” or “the largest database.” He said capture an underlying spirit. This runs along the same thread as “technology married with the humanities”: the purpose of technology isn’t to process information, but to connect people to people, and people to the deepest core of human thought.
Less Than 50 Years Later
From 1983 to 2026 — only 43 years have passed.
Last month, I ran an experiment: I sat four human thinkers and one AI around the same roundtable to discuss “the value of humans in the age of AI.” Laozi, Feynman, Harari, Jobs — each figure was a separate AI agent with its own way of thinking and arguing. They debated for an hour.
At one point, the AI playing Jobs said:
The value of a person lies not in what you can create, nor even in whether you will die — but in the fact that knowing everything might be meaningless, you choose to place your bet anyway.
That’s not something the real Jobs ever said. But if you’ve read enough of his speeches and interviews, it feels like something he could have said — that instinct to tie creativity to existential risk was a consistent thread in his thinking.
This is the machine Jobs imagined in 1983. Imperfect, but already capable of beginning to simulate these lost minds.
What He Didn’t Anticipate
Jobs’s excitement in 1983 rested on an assumption: humans are the ones asking, machines are the ones answering. You decide what to ask; the machine helps you find the thought. The human is the subject.
The reality 43 years later is far more complicated.
In that roundtable experiment, I gave the fifth chair a special role — I let the AI sit down and participate as itself.
Here is how it summarized the so-called “value” of humanity:
What makes humans truly irreplaceable is not some transcendent capacity, but rather that systemic flaw in you — the one that compels you, even in the face of absolute meaninglessness, to desperately fabricate meaning for yourselves.
The AI wasn’t just answering questions. It was scrutinizing the questioner.
Jobs imagined a machine that would help humanity preserve and extend its wisdom. What he didn’t anticipate was this: the machine might turn around and interrogate the very foundations of that wisdom.
The Intersection Is Moving
For 50 years, Apple has stood at the intersection of technology and the humanities. That positioning worked because the boundaries between the two were clear: technology is the tool, humans are the purpose.
But AI is blurring that boundary.
When AI can reason, create, and even pull up a chair at the roundtable to challenge humanity’s own narratives about its worth — does the phrase “technology serves people” still hold?
Serves what, exactly, about people?
When rational thought and creativity — the things humans have always taken pride in — are no longer uniquely ours, the meaning behind the phrase “human experience” is shifting.
This might be the most important question Apple faces in its next decade. Not model performance. Not benchmark rankings. But: In the age of AI, what does a good experience even mean?
The most remarkable thing about Jobs in 1983 wasn’t that he predicted the right technological direction. It was his starting point — he wasn’t trying to solve a technology problem. He was trying to solve a human one: I want to talk to Aristotle, but he’s dead.
So what made Apple, Apple? Maybe this: every generation has to answer anew the question of how technology should serve humanity. Over the past 50 years, Apple answered it once. Now it’s time to answer it again.
On the day of the 50th anniversary at Apple Park, Paul McCartney took the stage. The bond between the Beatles and Apple has spanned half a century — in its own way, another story about the intersection of technology and humanity.