BlackBerry vs Apple

Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin founded Research In Motion in a Waterloo, Ontario garage in 1984. Lazaridis had a vision of wirelessly connected devices at a time when the concept seemed purely theoretical. The company spent its first decade building wireless infrastructure components for other companies, generating enough revenue to fund Lazaridis's real obsession: a handheld device that could send and receive email wirelessly.

RIM launched the BlackBerry 850 in 1999 — a pager-sized device with a tiny QWERTY keyboard that could send and receive emails wirelessly. Corporate executives who had previously been unreachable when away from their desks were now permanently connected. The device became so addictive that users nicknamed it the "CrackBerry." By 2007, BlackBerry had 8 million subscribers and was the dominant device for business communication worldwide. Barack Obama was so attached to his BlackBerry that the Secret Service had to negotiate terms for him to keep it after becoming President.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said he was not worried — the iPhone lacked the security and enterprise features that BlackBerry's corporate customers required. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis agreed, adding that the iPhone's battery life was inadequate. Both assessments were partially correct. Both turned out to be irrelevant. Consumers chose the iPhone anyway, and enterprise IT departments followed their employees. BlackBerry's market share fell from approximately 50% to under 1% in six years.

BlackBerry abandoned smartphone hardware manufacturing in 2016 — ending the device that had defined it — and pivoted entirely to enterprise software and cybersecurity. The company's QNX operating system, which runs in over 235 million vehicles worldwide, became its most valuable asset. BlackBerry also developed cybersecurity software for government and enterprise clients, building a business that was profitable but a fraction of the company's former scale.

By 2025, BlackBerry had transformed into a software company focused on endpoint security, automotive embedded systems, and government cybersecurity — with revenue around $500 million annually. The physical keyboard that had once been the most influential human-computer interface in business history was a collector's item. The company that had been Barack Obama's favourite phone and the most addictive device in corporate history was now a mid-sized software vendor that most of its former users had forgotten entirely.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. Wozniak had designed the Apple I — a bare circuit board with no keyboard, case, or display — and Jobs saw the commercial potential. Wayne, who co-signed the founding documents, sold his 10% stake back for $800 just twelve days later. That stake would eventually be worth over $700 billion.

After a boardroom power struggle with CEO John Sculley — a man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi with the now-famous line "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" — Jobs was stripped of his duties and left Apple in September 1985. He founded NeXT and later acquired Pixar for $10 million. Both decisions would prove transformative.

By 1997, Apple was burning through cash at a catastrophic rate and was reportedly 90 days from insolvency. In a move that stunned the industry, Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million — and brought Steve Jobs back. At Macworld that year, Bill Gates appeared on screen via satellite to announce Microsoft's $150 million investment in Apple. The crowd booed. But the cheque cleared.

On January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple was reinventing the phone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed it: "There's no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." He was wrong. The iPhone became the most profitable consumer product in history, generating over $1 trillion in cumulative revenue and establishing Apple as the defining technology company of the 21st century.

On August 2, 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation. It then crossed $2 trillion in 2020, $3 trillion in 2022, and by mid-2026 had reached $4.36 trillion — a figure larger than the GDP of Germany. The Services segment, which includes the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Music, now generates over $100 billion annually and commands margins that rival the most profitable software companies on earth.

After years of criticism for lagging behind in AI, Apple launched Apple Intelligence across its device ecosystem in 2025 and 2026, partnering with Google to integrate Gemini directly into Siri. The strategy — on-device AI with a privacy-first model, rather than massive cloud infrastructure buildout — proved controversial but financially vindicated. Q1 fiscal 2026 revenue hit a record $143.8 billion, up 16% year-over-year, with iPhone sales surging 23%. Apple had shifted 25% of iPhone production to India to reduce geopolitical risk, and analysts at Wedbush were calling the upcoming iPhone 18 cycle a generational buying opportunity.