Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, often played a Beatles or a Bob Dylan track while showcasing new products from the company. But the road has been long and winding before the tech giant and the Fab Four (in some form) could meet eye to eye. Last week, it was a dream come true when Paul McCartney performed at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, to mark the company’s 50th anniversary.

Jobs, who died in 2011, lived by the Beatles philosophy. He once described his model for business: “My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.”

But it took decades for a Beatle to land up in Apple’s backyard, to play songs like Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, Hey Jude and much more.

Let’s dial back the clock. George Harrison was reading an in-flight magazine in 1978. It contained an advertisement for a new computer company, founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The logo? A large, rainbow-coloured Apple with a bite taken out of it. The name was Apple Computer (originally Apple Computer Company). Harrison was unaware that a designer named Rob Janoff had created Apple’s new logo to highlight the innovative colour display on the new Apple II computer.

It probably reminded him of a company that the Beatles started more than a decade earlier. The Fab Four opened a hip boutique clothing store in Marylebone in December 1967, and in January 1968, they decided to expand their business horizons, and Apple Music Ltd. became Apple Corps. It was a multimedia company that controlled a series of other businesses, like publishing, merchandise, and other creative pursuits. It also included the record label, Apple Records.

After Harrison spotted the logo, there were a number of legal tussles between Apple Corps and the company the two Steves had started, which ultimately tilted towards the tech giant.

That’s not to say the members of the band did not speak to Jobs over the decades. Former Apple executive Tony Fadell, who worked with Jobs as senior vice-president of the iPod division, once remembered a lunch when the tech guru received a phone call from McCartney and excitedly declared, “Oh my God! I gotta take this!”

A moment from the film Project Hail Mary, which has used a song that Steve Jobs quoted in his interview —Two of Us

McCartney, during his gig at Apple Park, told the audience: "I knew Steve and we became pretty good friends. I haven't had the heart to delete his number from my phone. Why would I?"

Then there is the story of Sean Lennon’s birthday in 1984. Jobs was invited to a party where the guest list included Andy Warhol. The gift he brought along was a Macintosh computer that was released earlier that year. He set up the Macintosh on the floor of Lennon’s bedroom and then showed the young boy how to use the mouse by opening up MacPaint.

Jobs, Sean Lennon and Warhole

Equally intrigued was Warhol, who recorded in his diary: “… there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said: ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it… I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.”

Warhol didn’t produce drawings on the Apple computer, but he included Apple’s logo in a portfolio of prints in 1985. The series, called Ads, also included trademarks for Chanel, Paramount, and Mobil.

McCartney has been a long-time user of Apple products. He has captured riffs and song fragments in the Voice Memos app on his iPhone, some of which became full-blown songs on his 2020 solo album, McCartney III. Before that, Macca starred in an animated iTunes and iPod advert in 2007 that featured his song Dance Tonight, and iTunes offered an exclusive pre-order of his album Memory Almost Full. At the time, Steve Jobs commented: “Paul McCartney is one of the greatest musicians of all time.”

Life has come full circle for Apple and the Beatles in another way — and not just within their own shared history. The connection continues to surface in unexpected places, including popular culture.

In one of the gut-punching moments in the film Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), a middle-school science teacher and former molecular biologist on a mission to save humanity, names his space probes John, Paul, Ringo and George. The probes head towards Earth while the Beatles’ Two of Us plays.

The same song came up at D5 Conference in 2007, when Jobs spoke about knowing Bill Gates and the journey the two companies had shared.

As he put it: “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead. That’s clearly true here.”

Macca did the lion’s share of writing the song. “Linda (McCartney, his late wife) and I used to love to go for a drive, the ‘Two of Us riding nowhere’,” McCartney wrote in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “It didn’t matter which direction we took. Anywhere out of London we would find a forest or a country field.”

Now, all eyes are on McCartney’s next solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, arriving May 29.