Chris Espinosa has spent 50 years inside Apple, making him one of the company’s most enduring employees and a living link to its earliest days. He is still there now, long after the startup that began in Steve Jobs’ garage became one of the most valuable technology companies in the world.
His story stands out not only because of how long he stayed, but because he helped build Apple from the beginning. Espinosa wrote programs, tested software, and helped demonstrate products when the company was still assembling computers by hand.
How a teenager entered Apple’s orbit
Espinosa first met Steve Jobs at Byte Shop, where Jobs was installing Apple I. Jobs later recruited him at the age of 14 to write BASIC programs for the Apple II, starting a relationship that would last through multiple eras of the company.
He also met Steve Wozniak at the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California. Even though teachers at Homestead High School in Cupertino warned him to be careful around Jobs and Wozniak, Espinosa still chose to join Apple’s early effort.
| Stage | Details | Context |
|---|---|---|
| First meeting | Byte Shop | Met Steve Jobs while Apple I was being installed |
| Recruitment | Age 14 | Asked to write BASIC programs for Apple II |
| Early environment | Homebrew Computer Club | Met Steve Wozniak in the computer hobby community |
From the garage to Berkeley
After joining, Espinosa worked out of Steve Jobs’ garage in Los Altos, California, where Apple’s early operations were still extremely modest. His employee number was 8, placing him among the company’s youngest early staff members.
He came in every Wednesday after school to write demo programs, test Integer BASIC for the Apple II ROM, and present the Apple II to prospective customers. In 1978, after finishing high school, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley and became the only full-time break in his Apple career.
Even while studying, he stayed on as a part-time employee and was assigned to rewrite the Apple II user manual. The result was a 220-page technical document created with UNIX typesetting tools, which later became an important guide for Apple II users in the early 1980s.
Staying through Apple’s hardest years
Across five decades, Espinosa watched Apple launch the Apple I, Apple II, Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and its newer products. He also lived through the years when the company came close to collapse, especially in the 1990s before Steve Jobs returned in 1997.
Apple went through repeated layoffs during that period, and Espinosa felt the uncertainty as well. He later told The New York Times that one manager said he avoided being laid off not because of performance, but because his severance package was too expensive for the company to pay.
“Apple mem-PHK karyawan lagi, dan lagi, dan lagi,” Espinosa said. He summed up his long stay with a line that captures both loyalty and timing: “Saya ada di sini saat kami menyalakan lampu. Saya sekalian saja bertahan sampai kami mematikan lampunya.”
Still part of Apple today
That mindset helped keep him at Apple for half a century, and he now works on the tvOS team, the operating system for Apple TV. While Steve Jobs died in 2011 and Steve Wozniak has long since stepped away from active company life, Espinosa remains an active bridge between Apple’s garage era and its modern scale.
Apple now reports annual profit of more than $100 billion and says it has 2.5 billion active devices worldwide. From a hand-built startup to a global giant valued at nearly $4 trillion, the company has changed beyond recognition, but Espinosa has remained part of the story from the very beginning.