2. Apple and company formation
• On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer Company was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald
Wayne .The company was registered as a California business partnership.Wayne, who worked
at Atari as a chief draftsman, agreed to become a co-founder of the company in return for a 10%
stake.However, Wayne was somewhat gun-shy due to the failure of his own venture four years earlier.
On April 12, less than two weeks after the company's formation, Wayne left Apple, selling his 10%
share back to the two Steves for only $800 and leaving them as the active primary co-founders.
• Soon after the company was formed, the two Steves made one last trip to the Homebrew Computer
Club and demonstrated the finished version of the Apple I. Paul Terrell,who operated a computer
store chain named the Byte Shop, was in attendance, and became impressed with the machine.He
handed the two Steves his card, and told them to "keep in touch.
3. Apple and company formation
• The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 as an assembled circuit board with
a retail price of $666.66. Wozniak later said he had no idea about the
relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and that he came
up with the price because he liked "repeating digits".Eventually, about
200 units of the Apple I were sold.
• The Apple I computer had a few notable features. One was the use of
a TV as the display system, whereas many machines had no display at all.
This was not like the displays of later machines, however; the text was
displayed at 60 characters per second. However, this was still faster than
the teleprinters used on contemporary machines of that era. The Apple I
also included bootstrap code on ROM, which made it easier to start up.
Finally, at the insistence of Paul Terrell, Wozniak also designed a
cassette interface for loading and saving programs, at the then-rapid
pace of 1200 bit/s. Although the machine was fairly simple, it was
nevertheless a masterpiece of design, using far fewer parts than anything
in its class, and quickly earning Wozniak a reputation as a master
designer.
4. Apple and company formation
Encouraged by the success of the Apple I, Jobs started looking for investments to
further expand the business,but banks were reluctant to lend him money; the idea
of a computer for ordinary people seemed absurd at the time.
In August 1976, Jobs approached his former boss at Atari, Nolan Bushnell, who
recommended that he meet with Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia
Capital.Valentine was not interested in funding Apple, but in turn introduced Jobs
to Mike Markkula, a millionaire who had worked under him at Fairchild
Semiconductor.
Markkula, unlike Valentine, saw great potential in the two Steves, and decided to
become an angel investor of their company.He invested $92,000 in Apple out of his
own property while securing a $250,000 (equivalent to $1,120,000 in 2019) line of
credit from Bank of America.In return for his investment, Markkula received a one-
third stake in Apple.With the help of Markkula, Apple Computer, Inc. was
incorporated on January 3, 1977.
The new corporation bought out the old partnership the two Steves formed nine
months earlier.
5. 1985: Jobs and Wozniak leave Apple ;
Although its products provided 85% of Apple's sales in early 1985, the company's January
1985 annual meeting did not mention the Apple II division or employees. This frustrated
Wozniak, who left active employment at Apple early that same year to pursue other ventures,
stating that the company had "been going in the wrong direction for the last five years" and
sold most of his stock. Despite these grievances, Wozniak left the company amicably and as of
January 2018 continues to represent Apple at events or in interviews, receiving a stipend over
the years for this role estimated in 2006 to be $120,000 per year.
In April 1985, Sculley decided to remove Jobs as the general manager of the Macintosh
division, and gained unanimous support from the Apple board of directors.Rather than submit
to Sculley's direction, Jobs attempted to oust him from his leadership role at Apple.Informed
by Jean-Louis Gassée, Sculley found out that Jobs had been attempting to organize a coup and
called an emergency executive meeting at which Apple's executive staff sided with Sculley and
stripped Jobs of all operational duties.
Jobs, while taking the position of Chairman of the firm, had no influence over Apple's
direction and subsequently resigned from Apple in September 1985 and took a number of
capable Apple employees with him to found NeXT Inc. In a show of defiance at being set aside
by Apple Computer, Jobs sold all but one of his 6.5 million shares in the company for $70
million.
6. “
”
1997–2001: Apple's comeback
On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board
of directors. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO to begin a critical
restructuring of the company's product line. He would eventually
become CEO and served in that position until August 2011. On
August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned his position as chief executive
officer of Apple before his long battle with pancreatic cancer took
his life on October 5, 2011.
On November 10, 1997, Apple introduced the Apple Store, an online
retail store based upon the WebObjects application server the
company had acquired in its purchase of Next. The new direct sales
outlet was also tied to a new build-to-order manufacturing strategy
Return of Steve Jobs !
7. Microsoft Deal ;
At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple
would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in
this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to
release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150
million investment in Apple.
As part of the deal, Apple and Microsoft agreed to settle a long-
standing dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating
system infringed on any of Apple's patents.It was also announced
that Internet Explorer would be shipped as the default browser on
the Macintosh, with the user being able to have a preference.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared at the expo on-screen,
further explaining Microsoft's plans for the software they were
developing for Mac, and stating that he was very excited to be
helping Apple return to success.
8. Retail stores
- In May 2001, after much speculation, Apple
announced the opening of a line of Apple retail
stores, to be located throughout the major U.S.
computer buying markets. The stores were designed
for two primary purposes: to stem the tide of Apple's
declining share of the computer market and to
respond to poor marketing of Apple products at third-
party retail outlets.
9. Initially, the Apple Stores were only opened in the United States, but in late 2003,
Apple opened its first Apple Store abroad, in Tokyo's Ginza district. Ginza was
followed by a store in Osaka, Japan in August 2004. In 2005, Apple opened stores
in Nagoya, the Shibuya district of Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Sendai. Another store
was opened in Sapporo in 2006. Apple's first European store opened in London,
on Regent Street, in November 2004. A store in the Bullring shopping centre
in Birmingham opened in April 2005, and the Bluewater shopping
centre in Dartford, Kent opened in July 2005.
Apple opened its first store in Canada in the middle of 2005 at the Yorkdal
Shopping Centre in North York, Toronto. Later on in 2005 Apple opened
the Meadowhall Store in Sheffield and the Trafford Centre Store
in Manchester (UK). Recent additions in the London area include the Brent
Cross Apple Store (January 2006), the Apple Store in Westfield in Shepherd's
Bush (September 2008) and the Apple Store in Covent Garden (August 2010),
which is currently the largest store in the world.
10. Financial History; As cash reserves increased significantly in 2006,
Apple created Braeburn Capital on April 6, 2006 to manage its assets.
13. The history of the bitten apple:
• The first Apple logo was designed in 1976 by Ronald Wayne, sometimes referred to as the third co-founder of Apple.
The logo depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, an apple dangling precipitously above his head. The phrase on the
outside border reads, “Newton… A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone.”
• According to Janoff, the “bite” in the Apple logo was originally implemented so that people would know that it
represented an apple, and not a cherry tomato. It also lent itself to a nerdy play on words (bite/byte), a fitting reference
for a tech company.
• The current logo, the one everyone knows, wasn’t made simply because Steve Jobs is always looking to change things
up. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was bleeding money, and Jobs and Co. realized that the Apple
logo could be leveraged to their advantage.
• If the shape of the Apple logo was universally recognizable, why not put it where people could see it?
• When Apple released their first ever iMac, the Bondi Blue, the logo was changed and its rainbow colors disregarded.
The rainbow-colored logo would have looked silly, childish and out of place on the sky-blue computer.
• The logo then took on a metallic look with embossing, which was applied on many of their products.
• The “Glass” themed logo was the next evolution for the logo.
• Today, the company uses a more modernized flat “Millennial” Apple logo. The logo comes mainly in 3 colors; silver,
white and black.
