By Ben Cohen | Photography by Poppy Lynch for WSJ
CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Inside a room filled with objects that would make every Apple nerd's brain explode, the guts of the very first iPhone were splayed out in front of Tim Cook.
Apple's chief executive was staring at something that he hadn't seen in decades. Before him was a tangle of circuit boards the size of a cutting board -- big enough to slice a few Granny Smiths. The last time he looked at it was before everything was miniaturized and crammed into the iPhone. It was so long ago that the prototype was still waiting to be transformed into Apple's most valuable product.
"This," he said, "is so cool."
As he admired the innards of a primordial iPhone, Cook found himself surrounded by artifacts that trace the history of Apple from a startup in a garage to the most iconic company in America.
The Apple II, the Macintosh and a Bondi blue iMac signed by Steve Jobs. The original iPod, iPhone and iPad, also signed by Steve Jobs. There were storyboards of the classic "1984" ad, color studies for Apple's rainbow logo and drafts of the seminal memo laying out the company's guiding principles. There were even mock-ups of unforgettable Macintosh icons like Trash, Bomb and Happy Mac.
For most of its 50-year history, this would have been heresy at Apple. The company is so indifferent to its own archives that even the CEO didn't know they existed.
"I'm guilty of that," Cook told me. "We don't have a place where we display all of this older stuff, including our prototypes -- and so a lot of this, I've seen for the first time in preparing for the 50th anniversary. I know it sounds weird, but it's the truth."
It's also true that Apple has spent the past half-century relentlessly looking forward. But this week, Cook took a rare moment to look back -- and invited me to look with him.
Before I tell you what we saw, watch my interview with Cook:
In the days before Cook showed me the archives, I went digging through The Wall Street Journal's.
This newspaper's first mention of Apple was all the way back on April 17, 1978, buried in the 16th paragraph of a story on Page 40 about investors with a secret weapon: the personal computer.
In 1980, Steve Jobs made his debut in a brief article on Apple's plans to go public. He received the honor of a Journal stipple portrait in 1985, after he was pushed out of the company that he co-founded. When he returned from his exile in 1997, he was no longer "Steven P. Jobs" -- just "Steve Jobs." And in 1998, the Journal reported that Jobs had recruited an operations guru to Apple. His name was Tim Cook.
Apple is now known as the company that made computers for the rest of us and put them in our pockets. It raised a toast to the crazy ones, told everyone to think different, sold billions of phones, banked trillions of dollars and filled our drawers with a gazillion white cables.
Back then, however, nobody knew if the company would last another year, much less to 50.
But during the greatest turnaround that Silicon Valley has ever seen, Jobs was fanatical about one idea: Apple was a place to invent the future, not dwell on the past.
To this day, nostalgia is about as welcome in Apple Park as an Android phone.
While tech giants are not exactly in the habit of building museums, Apple has enough history to fill one.
Until the 1990s, Apple had a team of corporate librarians who guarded the company's archival treasures like they were trade secrets. But when Jobs returned, they received a call informing them that the off-site warehouse where they stashed documents and products would be shuttered in 24 hours -- and anything that wasn't preserved would be destroyed. The librarians rushed over to save their boxes, storing them in an HVAC room. Before long, the library was closed altogether and relics of Apple's early days were donated to Stanford.
These days, Apple's archival materials are held in several humidity-controlled storage facilities. They include everything from sketches of Apple logos to the bench and desk of the Apple I's presentation at the Homebrew Computer Club a half-century ago.
In recent months, Apple collected objects from its trained archivists and employees. For one day this week, they were all in the same room.
When I met Cook, handlers in white gloves were carefully arranging the curated items on pristine wood tables, as if they were for sale in an Apple Store.
Apple nerds would have paid Vision Pro prices to see these gems: prototypes of the iPod's click wheel and Apple Watch's crown, the early iMac and iPad autographed by Jobs, that clamshell iBook in tangerine orange.
Just a dongle's throw away, there were crude incarnations of a contraption that would become the iPhone.
Even Cook hadn't seen the primitive versions of the company's most popular devices since the days when he was responsible for the supply chain to manufacture them.
"I don't want to touch anything," he said. "I don't want to leave a fingerprint."
Only looking at them, he shared the lessons that all these prototypes taught him.
The paradox of simplicity: "It's hard doing simple. It's easy doing complex."
The power of iteration: "Products are only overnight successes in reverse. The iPod was not, the iPhone was not, the Watch was not."
The upside of failure: "Every failure is the chance to learn something didn't work. So in a strange kind of way, I don't really view them as huge failures. We shipped products that weren't successful. We just got up the next day and put our head down and went on to the next thing. But we learned something in the process of doing that. If you're focusing on failure, you discourage people from taking risk and making bold moves, and that is the last thing we want to do."
In the spirit of looking back at the company's past, I had to show Cook one more thing.
It was a slice of Apple history that he'd never seen -- because it was from a different archive. To surprise him, I brought a story from Page 40 of the April 17, 1978 newspaper and pointed to the 16th paragraph: Apple's first appearance in the Journal.
As he squinted to read it, I told him the article was about investors discovering --
"The personal computer," he said. "It sends a chill up my spine."
Like peeking at the guts of the iPhone, it was the first glimpse of something before anyone knew what it could be.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 03, 2026 11:45 ET (15:45 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
