Apple

Overview

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, that created the first commercially successful personal computer and later brought the graphical user interface, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad to mass adoption (Britannica). This is Apple Inc. the technology company — not the fruit, and not Apple Corps, the Beatles’ record label with which it fought trademark battles (Britannica).

The company began with Wozniak’s lifelong dream of building his own personal computer (Britannica). Inspired by the Altair 8800 and encouraged by friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, Wozniak — then a 26-year-old engineering intern at Hewlett-Packard — developed a simple gaming motherboard (Britannica). When Hewlett-Packard showed no interest, he teamed up with 21-year-old Jobs, a former high-school classmate, and the two set up operations in the Jobs family garage, founding Apple Inc. on April 1, 1976, along with Ronald Wayne (Britannica). Jobs and Wozniak each held a 45% stake and Wayne 10%; to fund the venture Jobs sold his Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak his programmable calculator (Britannica).

The Apple I, the Apple II, and the visit to PARC

With the help of its first angel investor, Intel veteran Armas Clifford “Mike” Markkula, Apple unveiled its inaugural product, the Apple I, in July 1976 at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting (Britannica). Selling for $666.66, it was a bare motherboard with a basic CPU, memory and video capabilities but no keyboard or monitor — yet it sold 200 units that year (Britannica). Later that year Wayne left, selling back his 10% share for $800 (Britannica). In January 1977, with Markkula providing $250,000 in seed funding, Apple Inc. was incorporated (Britannica). The Apple II, released in April 1977, became the first widely distributed microcomputer, with color graphics, sound and television plug-in capabilities at a base price of $1,298; some 5 or 6 million units were sold over the next decade (Britannica).

In 1979, Jobs led a team of engineers to see the innovations created at Xerox PARC in California (Britannica). There they were shown three features that became Apple’s game-changing innovations: the functional graphical user interface featuring on-screen windows, a pointing device known as a mouse, and icons in place of command-line instructions (Britannica). These were integrated into the Apple Lisa (1983) and the Apple Macintosh (1984) (Britannica). Xerox would later sue Apple in 1989, claiming it stole the idea for its graphical user interface; the lawsuit was dismissed in 1990 on technical grounds, with the court saying Xerox chose the wrong venue for most of its legal points (Britannica). By 1980 the company netted over $100 million with more than 1,000 employees, and in December 1980 it went public, offering 4.6 million shares at $22 each — the biggest IPO since Ford’s in 1956 (Britannica).

The Macintosh, the ouster, and the return

The Macintosh arrived after the Lisa’s failure — the Lisa’s $9,995 price tag was more than five times the cost of an IBM PC, and the machine was sluggish and incompatible (Britannica). Introduced via a television commercial during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, directed by Ridley Scott, the Macintosh combined a user-friendly graphical interface, an all-in-one design and a $2,500 price (Britannica). But the first Macs sold below expectations, with insufficient memory and storage and no color display or cursor keys, and in September 1985 Jobs was ousted by chief executive John Sculley; Wozniak had left in February 1985 (Britannica). Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 and the next year purchased Lucasfilm’s Computer Graphics Division to create Pixar (Britannica). Meanwhile IBM’s PC, built from readily available components including an Intel microprocessor and a disk operating system from Microsoft, had won the business market, and Apple litigated for years in vain to stop Microsoft copying the Mac’s “look and feel” (Britannica).

Apple’s fortunes turned when it purchased NeXT Software in 1996, and in mid-1997 its board recruited Jobs as a temporary replacement after its market share fell to roughly 3% (Britannica). Jobs streamlined the confusing product lines, announced an alliance with Microsoft, and launched the iMac, which lifted Apple’s U.S. market share to roughly 13.5% in August 1998 from 2.6% in December 1997 and returned the company to profitability in fiscal 1998, its first profitable year since 1995 (Britannica). The reinvention continued with iTunes in 2001, the iPod later that year, downloadable songs in 2003, the touchscreen iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010 and iCloud in 2011 (Britannica).

The Adobe arc: from 19.9% stake to the Flash rupture

Apple’s relationship with Adobe began almost as early as Adobe itself, and it ran the full arc from partnership to public rupture. When Adobe co-founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock were building their company, a friend who had left Xerox to work for Jobs on the Macintosh brought Jobs to see their work (Knowledge at Wharton). Jobs first tried to buy the whole company — “Sell me your company, come work for me” — and when the founders refused, he settled for a licensing deal in which Apple took a 19.9% stake at five times the original venture valuation, plus prepaid royalties, bringing Adobe about $3.5 million in total (Knowledge at Wharton). The Lemelson Center corroborates the deal in rounded form, recording that Apple bought a 19 percent stake in Adobe and agreed to use PostScript in its LaserWriter printer, which hit the market in 1985 (Lemelson).

That printer, paired with Aldus PageMaker, launched the desktop publishing revolution and made graphic arts and publishing the Mac’s single most important market (Britannica). Geschke recalled that Adobe published the PostScript specification three or four months before the first LaserWriter shipped, and that after the LaserWriter and desktop publishing became a phenomenon, IBM and then Hewlett-Packard came seeking Adobe deals (Knowledge at Wharton). A quarter-century later the partnership broke in public: on April 29, 2010, Jobs published his 1,685-word “Thoughts on Flash,” arguing Flash had too many bugs, drained batteries too quickly and was designed for PCs using mice, not touchscreens — and, most importantly, that Flash put a third party between Apple and software developers (Associated Press). Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen had said the company was “committed to bringing Flash to any platform on which there is a screen” and that the ban “has nothing to do with technology” (Associated Press). Jobs closed by writing that “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of Web content” (Associated Press).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not cover Apple’s post-2011 history in depth — its services expansion, Apple silicon transition, or later leadership changes were outside this research pass, which ends with the iPad and iCloud era. It does not claim a precise figure for Apple’s current market value or product sales beyond the historical figures cited. The 19.9% Adobe stake rests on Geschke’s own 2008 account, corroborated in rounded form by the Lemelson Center; the two figures differ only by rounding (see open items). The “first commercially successful personal computer” framing follows Britannica’s characterization and is not a claim that Apple built the first personal computer of any kind.