The history of Apple Company

Apple is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. The company's hardware products include the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, the Mac personal computer, the iPod portable media player, the Apple smartwatch, and the Apple TV digital media player. Apple's consumer software includes the macOS and iOS operating systems, the iTunes media player, the Safari web browser, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store and Mac App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud. Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976 to develop and sell personal computers. It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. in January 1977, and was renamed as Apple Inc. in January 2007 to reflect its shifted focus toward consumer electronics. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in March 2015. Apple is the world's largest information technology company by revenue, the world's largest technology company by total assets, and the world's second-largest mobile phone manufacturer, by volume, after Samsung. In November 2014, Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over US$ 700 billion in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization. The company employs 115,000 full-time employees as of July 2015 and maintains 478 retail stores in seventeen countries as of March 2016. It operates the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the world's largest music retailer. Consumers use more than one billion Apple products worldwide as of March 2016. Apple's worldwide annual revenue totaled $233 billion for the fiscal year ending in September 2015. This revenue accounts for approximately 1.25% of the total United States GDP. The company enjoys a high level of brand loyalty and, according to Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report, has been the world's most valuable brand for 4 years in a row, with a valuation in 2016 of $178.1 billion. The corporation receives significant criticism regarding the labor practices of its contractors and its environmental and business practices, including the origins of source materials.

The third founder the history of everyone's favorite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves… The two Steves - Jobs and Wozniak - may have been Apple's most visible founders, but were it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iPhone, iPad or iMac today. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling for just $500 a holding that today would be worth $72bn. Ron Wayne.



The foundation of Apple: How Jobs met Woz Jobs met Woz at the Homebrew Computer Club; a gathering of enthusiasts in a garage in California's Menlo Park. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there - which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards -and was inspired by MITS' build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. You can see this philosophy shining through in Apple’s products today. So he produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn't trying to change the world with what he'd produced - he just wanted to show off how much he'd managed to do with so few resources. Speaking to NPR in 2006, he explained that "When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter - it should have a keyboard - and the output device is a TV set, it wasn't really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, and to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer." It almost didn't happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality -he's funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars - but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, "I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers." He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss. Let's be thankful he didn't. Jobs saw the computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator, and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne - now making Apple a 40 year old company! The foundation of Apple: The inspiration for the name The name was to cause Apple problems in later years as it came uncomfortably close to the Beatles' publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough. Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984, Woz credited Jobs with the idea. "He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned."