Apple Computers was founded in Los Gatos, California on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at $666.66. They were hand-built in Jobs' parents' garage, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs and Wozniak, had been friends since 1971. Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in assembling a personal computer and selling it. Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty units and paid $500 for each unit. Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor. Using a variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items including a Volkswagen Type 2 bus, Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak and another friend, Ronald Wayne, assembled the Apple I. They were delivered in June, and paid for on delivery. Eventually 200 Apple I computers were built.
The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Fair. It was popular with home users and was occasionally sold to business users, particularly after the release of the first spreadsheet for any computer called VisiCalc.
By now, Jobs and his partners had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The Apple II was succeeded by the Apple III in May 1980 as the company struggled to compete against IBM and Microsoft in the lucrative business and corporate computing market. The designers of the Apple III were forced to comply with Jobs' request to omit the cooling fan, and this ultimately resulted in thousands of recalled units due to overheating. An updated version was introduced in 1983 but it was also a failure due to bad press and discouraged buyers. Nevertheless, the principals of the company persevered with further innovations and marketing.
The protagonist of Apple's well known 1984 ad, set in a dystopian future modeled after the Orwellian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.In the early 1980s, IBM and Microsoft continued to gain market share at Apple's expense in the personal computer industry. Using a fundamentally different business model, IBM marketed an open hardware standard created with the IBM PC, which was bundled with Microsoft's MS-DOS (MicroSoft-Disk Operating System). In 1983, Apple introduced the first personal computer to be sold to the public with a graphical user interface (GUI), named the Lisa. Using a GUI, the user communicates with the computer by interacting with icons onscreen that resemble real-world items (folders, documents, images). However, the Lisa was a commercial failure as a result of its high price tag ($9995) and limited software titles.
Jobs and several other Apple employees including Jef Raskin had visited Xerox PARC in December 1979, to see the Alto computer. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for selling them one million dollars in pre-IPO Apple stock (approximately $18 million net). After the Lisa, Apple began work on a similar but less expensive computer to be called the Macintosh. It was launched in 1984 with the now famous Super Bowl advertisement based on George Orwell's novel 1984. It was an immediate success, particularly in the world of graphic and communications design, where its GUI (which was to become the industry standard) and ability to handle large graphic files surpassed anything else on the market. The Macintosh also spawned the concept of Mac evangelism among users, which was pioneered by Apple employee and later Apple Fellow, Guy Kawasaki.
In anticipation of the Macintosh launch, Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, was given several Macintosh prototypes in 1983 to develop software for the "Mac". In 1985, Microsoft launched Microsoft Windows, with its own GUI for IBM PCs using many of the elements of the Macintosh OS. This led to a long legal battle between Apple Computers and Microsoft, and ended with an out-of-court settlement. In this settlement it was stated that Microsoft would be granted access to, and allowed unlimited use of, the Macintosh GUI.
An internal power struggle developed between Jobs and new CEO John Sculley in 1985. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley, and Jobs was asked to resign from the company. Jobs then founded NeXT Inc., a computer company that built machines with futuristic designs and ran the UNIX-derived NeXTstep operating system. Although powerful, NeXT computers never caught on with buyers, due in part to their high purchase price.
Having learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple turned to industrial designers and adopted a product strategy based in three portable devices. One portable was built by Sony, which had a strong reputation for designing small, durable and functional electronics devices. Sony took the specs of the Mac Portable, put in a smaller two-hour battery, a much smaller (physically) twenty megabyte hard drive and a smaller nine-inch passive matrix screen. Called the PowerBook 100, this landmark product was introduced in 1991 and established the modern form and ergonomic layout of the laptop computer. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer, both of desktop and now portable machines. The success of the PowerBook and several other Apple products during this period led to increasing revenue. The trade magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 to 1991 the "first golden age" of the Macintosh.
In 1994, Apple surprised its loyalists by allying with its long-time competitor IBM in the so-called AIM alliance. This was a high-profile bid to create a revolutionary new computing platform, known as PReP, which would use IBM and Motorola hardware and Apple software. It was expected that PReP's outstanding performance and software would leave the PC far behind and would upset Microsoft, which Apple had identified as its real enemy. As the first step toward launching the PReP platform, Apple started the Power Macintosh line in 1994, using IBM's PowerPC processor. This processor utilized a RISC architecture, which differed substantially from the Motorola 680X0 series that had been used by all previous Macs. Parts of Apple's new operating system software were rewritten so that most software written for older Macs could also run on the PowerPC series.
In 1993, Apple released the Newton, an early PDA. Though it failed commercially, it defined and launched the new category of computing and was a forerunner and inspiration of devices such as BlackBerry, Palm Pilot and its descendants-PocketPCs. Apple almost went bankrupt in the mid-1990s amidst cash flow difficulties, poor quality products and high prices, but it had learned from these mistakes. On February 4, 1997, Apple completed its purchase of NeXT and its NeXTstep operating system, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple's management. On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors after overseeing a 12-year record-low stock price and crippling financial losses, despite an outstanding decade of innovation. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO and began a critical restructuring of the company's product line.
Steve Jobs introducing the original iMac computer in 1998.In 1998, a year after Jobs had returned to the company, Apple introduced a new all-in-one Macintosh (echoing the original Macintosh 128K): the iMac, a new design that eliminated most Apple-standard connections like SCSI and ADB in favor of two USB ports. While technically not impressive (it was aimed at a general market), it featured an innovative new design - its translucent plastic case, originally Bondi Blue and white, and later many other colors, is considered an industrial design hallmark of the late-90s. The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 1998, making the company a profit that year of $309 million - Apple's first profitable year since Michael Spindler took the position of CEO of the company in 1995. The Power Macintosh was redesigned along similar lines, and continues to evolve to this day.
In 2001, Apple introduced Mac OS X, an operating system based on NeXT's NeXTstep and BSD Unix. Aimed at consumers and professionals alike, Apple claims that OS X marries stability, reliability and security of the Unix operating system with the ease of a completely overhauled user interface. To aid users in moving their applications from OS 9, the new operating system allowed the use of Mac OS 9 applications through OS X's Classic environment. Apple's Carbon API also allowed developers to adapt their OS 9 software to use Mac OS X's features.
Company headquarters on Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California. In May 2001, after much speculation, Apple announced the opening of a line of Apple retail stores, to be located in major U.S. computer buying markets. These stores were designed for two primary purposes: to stem the tide of Apple's declining share of the computer market, and to counter a poor record of marketing Apple products by third-party retail outlets.
In late 2001, Apple introduced its first iPod portable digital audio player, a move that has proven to be phenomenally successful with over 42 million units sold. Combined with a scheme to offer downloadable songs at US 99 cents per song through Apple's iTunes Music Store, there had been over 800,000,000 downloads for iPod players by January 2006.
In a keynote address on June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs officially announced that Apple would begin producing Intel-based Macintosh computers beginning in 2006. Jobs confirmed rumors that the company had secretly been producing versions of its current operating system Mac OS X for both PowerPC and Intel processors for the previous five years, and that the transition to Intel processor systems would last until the end of 2007. Jobs surprised the industry at Macworld 2006 however, by announcing the first Intel based Apple computers would begin selling in January 2006 and that the transition would be complete by the end of that same year. Mac OS X is based on OPENSTEP, an operating system available for many platforms. Apple's own Darwin, the open source underpinnings of OS X, is also compiled for Intel's x86 architecture.
