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Apple was founded
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. -
Founders
Steves - Jobs
Wozniak - may
Ronald Wayne -
1th President
Steve Jobs (1976) -
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Company History: 1976-1981
Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley. (Woz for Hewlett-Packard, Jobs for Atari) http://apple-history.com/h1 -
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The debut of the Apple II
The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like its predecessor, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/history-of-apple-steve-jobs-what-happened-mac-computer-3606104/#appleii -
The first app on an Apple computer: Visicalc
VisiCalc was unveiled in 1979 and described as "a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations". We owe it a debt of gratitude for the part it played in driving sales of the Apple II and anchoring Apple within the industry. -
The Lisa versus the Macintosh
The official line at the time was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, and the fact it was Jobs' daughter's name was purely coincidental. It was a high-end business machine slated to sell at close to $10,000. Convert that to today’s money and it would buy you a mid-range family car. The project was managed by John Couch, formerly of IBM. -
2th president
Michael Scott (1976-1981) -
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Company History: 1981-1983
Following the historic visit to Xerox PARC in 1979, Jobs and several other engineers began to develop the Lisa, which would redefine personal computing. http://apple-history.com/h2 -
Raskin left
Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 -
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Company History: 1983-1985
Although a successful businessman, it soon became clear that Sculley did not know much about the computer industry. He and Jobs were at odds almost immediately. As the announcement of the Macintosh drew closer, Jobs went into hyperdrive. He worked hard to get developers to write programs for the upcoming machine--Jobs had realized that the Mac would ultimately be made or broken by the software industry. http://apple-history.com/h3 -
the ad would qualify for the advertising awards
It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it's considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age's list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made. https://youtu.be/OYecfV3ubP8 -
3th president
Mike Markkula (1981-1983) -
Apple's '1984' advert
Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI – graphical user interface – to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform. -
Apple II success: colour graphics
The February 1984 edition of PC Mag, looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that "its packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator's hobby. -
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Company History: 1985-1993
Sculley became the de facto head of Apple in May 1985. Over the next few months, Apple was forced to lay off a fifth of its work force, some 1,200 employees. The company also posted its first quarterly loss. All this, and the resignation of Jobs, served to erode confidence in Sculley's abilities as CEO of Apple. http://apple-history.com/h4 -
What Gassée did after Apple
The fourth quarter of 1989 marked the first time Apple had seen a drop in sales. The stock market got edgy, Apple's shares lost a fifth of its value, and despite having once been tipped to one day head up the company, Gassée left the following year. Like Jobs, he went on to found another radical computer company – in this case, Be Incorporated, which developed the BeOS operating system. -
Apple in the 1990s
Apple was a very different company in the 1990s to the one we know today. It had a lot of products and a lot of stock, but not enough customers. There's only so long a company can survive like that. http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/history-of-apple-steve-jobs-what-happened-mac-computer-3606104/#appleii -
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Company History: 1993-1996
Spindler, by all accounts, was the wrong man for the job. A fairly impersonal man, Spindler's office was nearly impossible to get into. However, in his two and a half years as CEO, Spindler oversaw several accomplishments. http://apple-history.com/h5 -
4th president
John Sculley (1983-1993) -
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Company History: 1996-1997
Amelio made a strong effort to bring Apple back to profitability, but his efforts would prove to be largely unsuccessful. Following his first 100 days as CEO, Amelio announced broad changes in the corporate structure of the company. The company was to be split into 7 separate divisions, each responsible for its own profit or loss. http://apple-history.com/h6 -
5th president
Michael Spindler (1993-1996) -
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Company History: 1997-2000
Jobs' presence was known almost as quickly as NeXT was acquired. The degree of Jobs' "expanded role" soon became quite clear. With no CEO and Apple Stock lower than it had been in 5 years, there were many decisions to be made, and not much time to make them. http://apple-history.com/h7 -
7th president
Steve Jobs (1997-2011) -
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PageMaker versus QuarkXPress
But good things don't last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself). -
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Recent Changes
Continuing with checkpoint releases, this update brings all MacBook Pro models up to date, and adds the just-announced iPod touch (6th Generation). Next up is the new MacBook and older MacBook Airs, then Desktop models. I'll probalby save the Watch for last. Happy July! -
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Company History: 2000-2004
The second half of 2000 was rocky for Apple. Slower sales (both for Apple and the industry as a whole), combined with a misunderstanding of the consumer market resulted in the first unprofitable quarter in three years. One factor in this decline was the G4 Cube, which sold poorly due primarily to its high price compared to Apple's other products. http://apple-history.com/h8 -
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Quark versus InDesign
Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of that and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. -
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2009
Within hours of launching the comparison feature I managed to break it in attempt to fix bookmarking (which had been broken for comparison pages). Both work now. Thanks Matthias! http://apple-history.com/recent_changes -
2010
Happy (one month after) New Year! Added the Late 2009 models and the iPad. Made more smallish, not all that apparent under-the-hood changes. -
Steve Jobs Dead
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8th president
Tim Cook (2011-presente) -
2012
Welcome to the new apple-history! I've been slowly building the new UI over the past year, making slow but steady progress toward what you now see here. The frames-based site was nearly nine years old, and long overdue for a major rework, and I finally had time to finish it up during the holidays. I hope you love (or can at least tolerate) the new site! Here are some highlights of the new design -
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2014
More of a pre-update; I made a few corrections (keep 'em coming!) and updated the Max OS for recent hardware to be 10.10 and iOS 8.0. I hope to get the site caught up over the course of the next couple of months, rather than as a single monolythic update. Thanks to everyone for their continued support! -
Apple and Microsoft
If IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft's on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you'd never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that's probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic. -
Worldwide Developers Conference
Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. "[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map."' -
6th president
Gil Amelio (1996-1997)