Apple Still Plans to Sell iPhones When It Turns 100

Apple is allergic to nostalgia. In 2008, when the Macintosh was about to turn 25, I mentioned it to Steve Jobs and he instantly shut down the discussion. “If you look backward in this business, you'll be crushed,” he told me icily. “You have to look forward.” Now that Apple’s 50th anniversary looms, however, the company is begrudgingly engaging in a series of concerts and commemorations, and we’re being blitzed by books, articles, and oral histories of the company’s early years.

Rather than join the crowded trek down memory lane, I asked Apple to do what Jobs suggested—look forward. What does Apple want to happen in its next 50 years?

Earlier this month, I sat down with two senior executives to discuss just that. One was Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing, Greg Joswiak, aka Joz, who joined Apple in 1986. The other was SVP of hardware engineering John Ternus, the putative front-runner to succeed Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO. He’s been with the company for 25 years. I also chatted briefly with Cook himself, just before Alicia Keys sang in front of the Apple Store at Grand Central Station—the beginning of Apple’s reluctantly splashy anniversary celebration.

After acknowledging Apple’s uncharacteristic party mode—“this is too special” to ignore, admits Joswiak—we tackle the future. After launching the personal computer revolution, Apple managed to navigate multiple inflection points. With the Macintosh, it mastered the graphical user interface that makes computers friendlier to use. The iMac positioned the company for the internet boom. And, of course, despite a late start, Apple absolutely owned the mobile era with the iPhone. These products have remained vital–just this month Apple released the buzzy new Macbook Neo, the latest version of a 42-year-old franchise. But now the future belongs to AI—a category where Apple seems to have whiffed so far.

These gentlemen disagree. Apple, they insist, is already at the forefront of the AI revolution. “We were doing AI before we called it AI!” says Joswiak. “Every single great chatbot works great on our products.” Ternus argues that even if Apple didn't take the lead in developing AI technology, it would still benefit. “Our products are the best place people will use the existing AI tools.”

I push them on this. After all, if we're looking decades into the future, shouldn’t we assume that we’ll move past our current computing paradigms and adopt something that specifically caters to the wonders of AI? That’s what Apple’s former design guru Jony Ive seems to be doing with OpenAI. They’re only one entrant in the race to come up with new kinds of hardware devices built specifically for AI. “I would assume you want one of them to be an Apple device, right?” I asked.

The answer seemed to be not necessarily. “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that nothing you just said is incompatible with the iPhone,” Joswiak says. “The iPhone is not going to go away. iPhone is going to serve a very central role in any of those things you’re talking about.”

Wait—Apple thinks that people will be using the iPhone 50 years from now?

“It's hard to imagine not,” says Joswiak. “That's where everybody else struggles. They don't have an iPhone, and so they’re scrambling for what to do. A lot of what they talk about ends up being accessories for an iPhone. We’re not going to get into future road maps, but I will tell you, iPhones are not going anywhere.” (Despite this bravado, I will be shocked if Apple does not come out with some AI-powered gadget in the coming years.)

Later in the day I have my greeting with Cook, and immediately ask him about Apple’s next 50 years. He launches into a rhapsodic description of Apple’s people, values, and culture, predicting that no matter what twists lie ahead, those factors will continue to make Apple unique and super successful. “Yes, the technologies of the future will change,” Cook says. “Yes, there will be more products and more categories. All of those things are true, but the things that made Apple Apple will be the same for the next 50 years, and the next 100 and the next 1,000.”

That of course presumes that superintelligence doesn’t totally rearrange reality in the next 50 years, let alone the next millennium. It also flies in the face of what the leaders of AI companies believe. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has even postulated that his own successor as CEO will not be a human but an AI model! Does Cook see that as a possibility for Apple anytime in the next 50 years?

Cook laughed merrily at the idea. “When you look at the leadership page,” he says of future Apple, “there will not be an agentic kind of model on there.” Left unspoken is what the people of 2076 will be using to look up that page.

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.