Apple turns 50 and plans to keep selling the iPhone for another half-century

Apple turns 50, and the company is already thinking about what the next half-century will look like. In an anniversary interview with WIRED, Apple's top executives laid out their AI-era strategy in detail for the first time. The main takeaway: the iPhone is not going anywhere. The smartphone will remain the center of the ecosystem, with new layers forming around it.

Founded on April 1, 1976, by three engineers in Silicon Valley, Apple has gone from garage startup to the most valuable company in history, with a market capitalization above three trillion dollars. Today its ecosystem includes more than two billion active devices worldwide. The iPhone is still the flagship product, accounting for more than half of revenue.

The AI revolution has put an awkward question to Apple: what happens if voice assistants, smart glasses or neural interfaces displace the smartphone as the main gateway to the digital world? The company's answer is confident: that will not happen. At least not in the next ten to twenty years.

Executives describe Apple's strategy as evolution, not revolution. Artificial intelligence will not replace the iPhone; it will become a new layer on top of it. Apple Intelligence, launched in 2024, is already built into iOS and macOS: it rewrites text, generates images, summarizes emails and controls apps through an updated Siri. The company calls this the start of a multi-year transformation.

Apple is deliberately avoiding a direct chatbot race with OpenAI and Google. Its bet rests on three competitive advantages: privacy (most processing happens on the device itself, without sending data to the cloud), deep integration with its own M- and A-series chips, and full control over the ecosystem, from the processor to the App Store.

Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro and future augmented-reality glasses are positioned not as replacements for the iPhone but as extensions of what it can do. Spatial computing is the company's next bet, but it, too, is built around the smartphone rather than in place of it.

For the market, this is an important signal: Apple openly acknowledges that the AI era is not a threat to it but a tool for retaining its audience. The average iPhone ownership period has grown to four years, and ecosystem users leave less and less often. Built-in AI should make switching even less appealing.

By its centenary in 2076, judging by management's statements, Apple still intends to sell the iPhone. Or whatever carries that name by then. Betting on the continuity of the ecosystem rather than on discrete breakthroughs is the core strategy of one of the most valuable companies in history.