 I feel bad for the iPad. We can't make it five. Hi, I'm Walt Mossberg, executive editor of The Verge. And today is the 40th birthday of what I think is the most influential technology company of the last 20 years, Apple Inc. And let me talk about some of the Apple products that changed not only Apple, but society and the culture. The Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. So this is one of the many Apple II models over that long period that the Apple II was made. You'll notice this was the original Apple logo, which was in six colors. People who are Apple fans just say, I bleed in six colors. And this is the Apple IIc. And to our eyes, it looks like it should be a laptop. Kind of a heavy laptop, but a laptop. It weighs about seven, seven and a half pounds. And it came out, by the way, ironically, the same year as the Mac. And one of the things that I think is interesting about this that I think foretells a lot of what Apple did was this had no slots. But the Apple we know today where everything is sealed up, I think this might have been the first indication of it because there were no slots in this. Instead, they built in the functions of those cards and they had ports on the back for it. And that became common also, particularly in laptops. But this, remember, this is a desktop computer. For a company that really pioneered, they didn't invent the computer, the personal computer, but they certainly popularized it. And for a company that did that, their financial success was, I mean, they were blown out of the water by Microsoft in that period. When you think about the computer product that Apple makes, it's the Mac. The Mac was the computer that pioneered the interface that every computer uses now, which is the mouse or trackpad later and the graphical interface with dropdown menus and icons. I mean, nobody thinks twice about that today, but that was so different when they did the Mac that it was just laughed at. I mean, the other computer companies laughed at it. And Microsoft adopted the same graphical user interface for Windows about a year and a half after the first Mac came out. But it was more of a layer on top of what they had, whereas Apple built a whole computer based around it. And I'll tell you what my favorite Mac is, and it's this, which is much later than 1985 or 6. This is the MacBook Air. It's extremely common. Lots of people have them. Lots of people see them every day. I think this is the best laptop ever made. And I think that because not only of the fabulous stickers it has on it, which are not standard, they're optional. But when Steve Jobs introduced this in 2008, I was by then a technology columnist, and I was at the event. And he stood up on stage, and he carried out one of those interoffice manila envelopes with the red string at the top. And it didn't look like it was bursting at the seams or anything strange about it. He just undid the thing, and he pulled a laptop out of the envelope. I got a call or an email from him saying, when are you coming out to the Valley next? And I said, I think, whatever I said, a few weeks or a month. He said, well, do you think you could come a little sooner? I have something I want to show you. And I said, OK. And I came a couple weeks later. And he always put, if he showed me a product, he would always put it under a cloth. Even though it was only a few of us in the room, and I was the only one who had never seen it. So why put it under cloth? But in fact, I used to tease him about it. And he would say, I just like to do it this way. And it was a black cloth. And he would pull it off. And it was the iPod. And the iPod is what made Apple begin to explode and become the Apple that now on their 40th anniversary, we know of as this highly innovative, highly intriguing, hugely influential tech company. This started that. The iPod was a big, big deal, culturally and in every other way. And there were people that wanted two things. They wanted a widescreen iPod. And they wanted a phone built into it. And Jobs decided, he decided to do both on one device. The key to it was that he had engineers who came up with the 10-finger multi-touch thing we have now. But they came up with it in a tablet size. So essentially, they started to work briefly on the iPad before they started to work on the iPhone. So I get this phone call from him. And he says, we're having an event. We haven't announced it yet. But we're having an event. It would really be important to me if you came. And I said, well, when is it? And he gave me the date. And I said, Steve, it's in the middle of CES. I have all these appointments. I'll be in Vegas. I can't be in San Francisco at your event. He said, Walt, I'm telling you, this is going to be the biggest thing since the Mac. You are going to want to be there. Steve Jobs decided he was going to introduce the iPhone in the middle of the Consumer Electronics Show in January. And I remember saying to him afterward, why did you announce? And it blew CES out of the water. The iPhone announcement blew CES over. No one talked about anything else in the tech world. Everything else that was announced at CES was just drowned out. And while I certainly will never forget the many private conversations I had with him, which included, by the way, a lot of gossip and theorizing about things and where things were going, what was going on at this company, and why did they do this at Apple instead of this other way, and him arguing with me, whatever. Those were all great. But I think the irreplaceable moments are the ones where he was on stage doing that stuff. This is the original iPhone that went on sale in June of 2007. So I did not see this before it went on stage, unlike some other things. But they decided to give these to three journalists to review. But there was all kinds of restrictions. You were not supposed to be seen with it, and whatever. So I was walking from the hotel to the TV studio, and I had this on my ear. And I walked by an AT&T store. Who knows where the AT&T stores are? In New York or anywhere else, right? This was somewhere on the Upper East Side. There was a little AT&T store on the corner, and there was already a line of 50 people, because the thing was, I think, going on sale that night or something like that. And as I approached it, I'm talking to my wife, people start yelling at me. Some of them recognized me, and they were saying, Walt, come on over here and show us this thing. What do you think of it? Can we look at it? Can we hold it? You know? And it was like, no, no. I just had to kind of. iPhone completely changed the mobile phone industry. It completely changed the carrier industry, because Apple had power. Before the iPhone, the carriers had all the power. If you were a company that made a phone, you had to bow to the wishes of Verizon or AT&T in the United States or their counterparts in places like Europe, because they had the bigger brand than you did. But Apple had a bigger brand than the carrier, and Jobs was uncompromising. I would say this about Apple. When you take all this together, I think they have been the most influential company of any kind of the last 20 years, certainly. And if you look over their 40-year existence, when you consider that they were the first to popularize the personal computer, and then they were the first to commercialize the method by which you use a personal computer, the graphical user interface, and then they went on to do all these other things, they've probably been the most influential company overall, although it's especially the last 20 years. See the color of it? Did you look at the back of it? Rose gold? How do you feel about rose gold? I think it's pink. I don't like it. But I don't like the gold gold either. I think it's just too.