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History of Apple: The story of Steve Jobs and the company he founded

In this feature we tell the story of Apple. We start with the early days, the tale of how Apple was founded, moving on through the Apple I, to the Apple II, the launch of the Macintosh and the revolution in the DTP industry… To the tech-industry behemoth that we know and love today.

So sit back as we take a stroll down memory lane. Why not brush up on what really happened before you go and watch the Steve Jobs movie , with its interesting interpretations of several important events in the company’s history?

On 1 April 1976 Apple was founded, making the company 41 years old as of the 1 April 2017 – here’s a historical breakdown of the company.

The history of Apple

Our Apple history feature includes information about The foundation of Apple and the years that followed, we look at How Jobs met Woz and Why Apple was named Apple. The Apple I and The debut of the Apple II. Apple’s visit to Xerox, and the one-button mouse. The story of The Lisa versus the Macintosh. Apple’s ‘1984’ advert, directed by Ridley Scott. The Macintosh and the DTP revolution. Read more: The Mac’s Birthday .

We go on to examine what happened between Jobs and Sculley, leading to Jobs departure from Apple, and what happened during The wilderness years: when Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple, including Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise and how Apple teamed up with IBM and Motorola and eventually Microsoft. And finally, The return of Jobs to Apple.

The foundation of Apple

The history of everyone’s favourite 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 would have been worth $72bn 40 years later.

How Jobs met Woz

Jobs and Woz (that’s Steve Wozniak) were introduced in 1971 by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, who went on to become one of Apple’s earliest employees. The two Steves got along thanks to their shared love of technology and pranks.

Jobs and Wozniak joined forces, initially coming up with pranks such as rigging up a painting of a hand showing the middle-finger to be displayed during a graduaction ceremony at Jobs’ school, and a call to the Vatican that nearly got them access to the Pope.

The two friends were also using their technology know-how to build ‘blue boxes’ that made it possible to make long distance phone calls for free.

Jobs and Wozniak worked together on the Atari arcade game Breakout while Jobs was working at Atari and Wozniak was working at HP – Jobs had roped Woz into helping him reduce the number of logic chips required. Jobs managed to get a good bonus for the work on Breakout, of which he gave a small amount to Woz.

The first Apple computer

The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California’s Menlo Park from 1975. 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. This philosophy continues to shine through in Apple’s products today.

So Woz produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. 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 (National Public Radio) in 2006, Woz 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, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer.”

Jobs and Woz

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 Woz’s computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator (which cost a bit more than calculators do today!), and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.

Why Apple was named Apple

The name Apple was to cause Apple problems in later years as it was uncomfortably similar to that of 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.”

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

The name also likely benefitted by beginning with an A, which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings.

The Apple Logo

There are other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple. The idea that it was named thus because Newton was inspired when an Apple fell out of a tree hitting him on the head, is backed up by the fact that the original Apple logo was a rather complicated illustration of Newton sitting under a tree.

Later the company settled on the bite out of an Apple design for Apple’s logo – a far simpler logo design. These logos are probably the reason for other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple, with some suggesting that the Apple logo with a chunk taken out of it is a nod at computer scientist and Enigma code-breaker, Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide infused apple.

However, according to Rob Janoff , the designer who created the logo, the Turing connection is simply “ a wonderful urban legend.”

Equally the bite taken out of the Apple could represent the story of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament. The idea being that the Apple represents knowledge.

Selling the Apple I

Woz built each computer by hand, and although he’d wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts – at a price at that would recoup their outlay as long as they shipped 50 units – Jobs had bigger ideas.

Jobs inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. This meant that once the store had taken its cut, the Apple I sold for $666.66 – the legend is that Wozniak liked repeating numbers and was unaware of the ‘number of the beast’ conection. 

Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn’t exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend’s father, it wasn’t enough.

In the end, it was Byte Shop’s purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography , he convinced Cramer’s manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order.

“Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.”

An original Apple I (in a case)

Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it’s ultimately this that saw him duck out.

“Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together,”  Wayne told NextShark in 2013 . “If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes.”

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they’d been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.

As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom , “Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn’t even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn’t have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn’t be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case.”

An original Apple I board, from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection

Raspberry PI and the BBC’s Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, “Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.” The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.

Their scarcity has made them collectors’ items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren’t that deep, Briel Computers’  Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.

When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth – so much so that the decision to build a successor can’t have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.

The Apple II

The success of the first Apple computer meant that Apple was able to go on to design its predecessor.

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 the Apple computer before it, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.

Yes, the Apple II (or apple ][ as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson , credits with launching the personal computer industry.

The trouble is, the specs alone weren’t really enough to justify the $1,300 cost of the Apple II. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn’t until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world’s first ‘killer app’.

The first app on an Apple computer: Visicalc

Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised  “a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations…”

Of course, we’d recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things existed only on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.

Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today – in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today? Here’s our Numbers review .)

The technological limitations inherent in the hardware meant that it didn’t quite work as Bricklin had first imagined. The Apple II didn’t have an incorporated display and although the mouse had been invented it wasn’t bundled with the machine. So, the display became the regular screen, and the mouse was swapped out for the Apple II’s game paddle, which Bricklin described as being “a dial you could turn to move game objects back and forth… you could move the cursor left or right, and then push the ‘fire’ button, and then turning the paddle would move the cursor up and down.”

It was far from perfect and working this way was sluggish, so Bricklin reverted to using the left and right arrow keys, with the space bar in place of the fire button for switching between horizontal and vertical movement.

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.

Writing in Morgan Stanley’s Electronics Letter , shortly before its launch, analyst Benjamin M Rosen expounded his belief that VisiCalc was “so powerful, convenient, universal, simple to use and reasonably priced that it could well become one of the largest-selling personal computer programs ever… [it] could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.”

How right he was, as Tim Barry revealed in a later InfoWorld piece in which he described an experience that would have been familiar to many:

“When I first used VisiCalc on an Apple II, I wanted to get a version that could take advantage of the larger system capabilities of my CP/M computer. Alas it was not to be… We ended up buying an Apple II just to run VisiCalc (a fairly common reason for many Apple sales, I’m told).”

Apple itself credited the app with being behind a fifth of all series IIs it sold.

Apple II success: colour graphics

So a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn’t have been a success if it hadn’t adhered to the company’s already established high standards.

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. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from … computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard.”

More radically, though, the Apple II  “was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics… contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered.”

In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century – before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.

Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.

For VisiCalc, the future wasn’t so bright, largely because its developers weren’t quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc’s developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc – it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.

That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.

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Apple, Xerox and the one-button mouse

Apple has never been slow to innovate – except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We’re approaching the eighties in our trip through the company’s history and we’re at the point where it’s followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh?

The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry’s biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.

The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.

Xerox had established a research centre there – Xerox PARC, now simply called ‘parc’ – where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. Its work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers (we aren’t just talking about photocopiers!) Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.

The Apple I,  II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days’ access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.

To say this was a bargain would be a massive understatement. Apple has split its stock four times since then – in 1987, 2000, 2005 and 2014. Companies do this when the price of a single share starts to get too high, in an effort to stimulate further trading. So, assuming Xerox held on to those shares, it would have had 200,000 by 1987, 400,000 by 2000 and 800,000 by 2005. The split in 2014 was rated at seven to one, so Xerox’s holding would leap from 800,000 to 5.6m. Selling them at today’s prices would rake in $708m (£450m). Not bad for a three-day tour.

Jobs was bowled over by the Xerox Alto, a machine used widely throughout the park, with a portrait display and graphical interface, which was way ahead of its time. It had been knocking around for a while by then, but Xerox, which built 2000 units, hadn’t been selling it to the public. It wasn’t small – about the size of an under-counter fridge – but it was still considered a ‘personal’ machine, which was driven home by the user-centric manner in which it was used. It was the first computer to major on mouse use, with a three-button gadget used to point at and click on objects on the screen.

Jobs decreed that every computer Apple produced from that point on should adopt a similar way of working. Speaking to Walter Isaacson some years later, he described the revelation as “like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

The Lisa and the Macintosh

It kicked off a race inside Apple between the teams developing the Lisa and the Macintosh.

Jeff Raskin

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.

Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.

Whichever team got their first, Apple – as a company – wanted them to do it at a price that wasn’t prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto’s mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was a one-button mouse (which maybe hasn’t stood the test of time as well as Jobs might have expected, with most of us regularly requiring that ctrl-click or right-click).

Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa’s development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.

The Apple Lisa had an advanced gui

Michael Scott was Apple’s president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.

Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.

Named in honour of Raskin’s favourite edible apple (the McIntosh ), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn’t stop him making extensive changes though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.

However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs – technically – ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the Lisa.

It was a pyrrhic victory, though. The Macintosh, which we’ll be covering in more detail below, was a success, and Apple’s current computer line-up – iOS devices aside – descends directly from that first consumer machine.

You can’t say the same of the Lisa. It cost four times the price of the Macintosh, and although it had a higher resolution display and could address more memory, it wasn’t nearly as successful. Apple released seven applications for it, covering all of the usual business bases, but third party support was poor.

Nonetheless, Apple didn’t give up. The original Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, which cost around half the price of its predecessor and used the same 3.5in disks as the Macintosh. Then, in 1985, it rebranded the hard drive-equipped Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL and stimulated sales with a price cut.

At this point, though, the numbers didn’t add up, and the Lisa had to go. The Macintosh went on to define the company.

By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable machines, they hadn’t captured the public imagination to the same degree as their predecessors. Apple needed another hit, both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had largely ignored.

That hit, we all now know, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company’s future.

If you’d like a visual guide to Apple history take a look at our Apple timeline in pictures and video

All change: Jef Raskin versus Steve Jobs

The Macintosh

We’ll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 – two years after 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 – before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but this was tweaked to avoid infringing copyright), but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he’d originally envisaged.

Raskin’s early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple (he is Vice President of Software Technology), that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.

They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they’d already laid much of the groundwork for Apple’s own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.

If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it’s unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did – and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.

The Macintosh project: Simpler and smarter

Through several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.

The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it’s not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 – Apple’s fully graphical operating system.

The Macintosh project: good looks

But it wasn’t just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic – but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.

There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn’t have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.

Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We’ve dropped the ‘System’ monicker in favour of ‘OS’ (which stands for Operating System), but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, at least in the UK, but the name lives on for many users).

(You’d be surprised by how many people are confused by the fact that Apple still referrs to the Option key on the Mac keyboard even though on UK keyboards that key is known as Alt, find out more here : What is Option on a Mac?)

The Macintosh project: pixels

The hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, and Susan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.

Susan Kare and the Command logo she designed

It’s Kare that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac – among others – as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it’s used to denote a National Heritage site – not a campsite as has been reported.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today – albeit in finer forms.

The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn’t cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.

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.

Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.

You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from.

But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.

Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.

He put in a call to ChiatDay, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios in the UK, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.

The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.

International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.

So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.

Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and ChiatDay turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

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.

Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking ChiatDay to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.

One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. ChiatDay offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.

As Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, “Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. ‘I think we ought to go for it,’ he told his team.”

Thank goodness they did.

There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.

Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn’t have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.

The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company’s future, and kicked off a line of computers that’s still with us today – albeit in a very different configuration.

It’s perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.

‘Lemmings’ once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for – and a switch to Macintosh Office.

It wasn’t a great success. As sterndesign’s Apple Matters explains, the advert “left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea.”

Wired put it succinctly: “Apple fell flat on its face… People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence – something very different from the cheers that greeted ‘1984’ a year earlier.”

The Macintosh and the DTP revolution

The Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs’ spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic ‘1984’ advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][, if it was really going to thrive. It found it in the shape of PageMaker, backed up by the revolutionary Apple LaserWriter printer.

The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 – just over a year after the Macintosh – was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood – the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh – running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.

It wasn’t the first laser printer – just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn’t the first digital music player – but, in true Apple style, it was different , and that’s what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.

It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.

As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, “Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer.”

So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing – so far – was the software.

Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term ‘Desktop Publishing’, heard of Apple’s intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac’s graphical interface and the printer’s high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.

The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn’t see again until we all started reading online.

Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work – which is perhaps why it’s favoured by so many designers today. It’s hard to believe, in an age where we’re used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.

By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m – an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe .

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).

Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.

Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.

Quark versus InDesign

Of course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story to anyone in publishing. 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 InDesign 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. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here .

InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.

Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.

Jobs vs Sculley

It’s all been good news so far in our story of Apple’s founding and early development. We’re still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it’s offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.

To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.

Steve Jobs may have been Apple’s most public face, and the co-founder of the company, but he wasn’t its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn’t yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he’d acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple’s initial investors, but he didn’t want to run the company long term.

When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking ‘Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?’

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley’s reminiscences: ‘I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.’

That’s exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, ‘At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others’ sentences.’

Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it’s perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn’t like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.

From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.

Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn’t enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.

That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn’t helped by a downturn in the company’s fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn’t hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.

That’s exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 – just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.

Talking to the BBC in 2012 , Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: “When the Macintosh Office [Apple’s office-wide computing environment including networked Macintosh computers, file server, and a laser printer] was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn’t afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings – not just to cover the Mac’s problems. That’s what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.”

But Jobs wasn’t ready to go without a fight.

Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.

The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs’ fate was sealed.

Jobs leaves Apple

Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple’s chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.

This wasn’t Jobs’ style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that’s what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.

If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.

DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue , “Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run.”

So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we’ll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months. Read next: 12 Apple execs you need to know

Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve Jobs

The most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn’t entirely unexpected – and the news wasn’t greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs’ departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple’s Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line – particularly at a time when the company’s focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.

Apple post-Jobs (the first time)

In the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn’t be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.

However, with Jobs now busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should – in theory – deliver similar or higher profits.

The policy had its own nickname, ’55 or die’, which was a nod to Gassée’s dictat that the Macintosh II should deliver at least 55% profit per machine, perhaps explains why it was so expensive. A basic system with a 20MB hard drive (insufficient to hold an average Photoshop file today) started at $5500, but bumping up the spec, with a colour display, more memory and larger hard drive, could easily see the price double.

When stood against their PC counterparts, then, Apple’s new computers looked pretty expensive, but they had several benefits that kept their users loyal – in particular, the user interface. It’s important to remember that although Windows may be ubiquitous today, that wasn’t always the case.

When the Macintosh II first appeared in 1987, Windows was less than two years old, still at version 1.04, and still an add-on to DOS rather than a full-blown, stand-alone operating system.

Once the designers of the mid-1980s had got used to working visually, they didn’t want to go back to using a text-based computer, so until Windows hit the big time, which happened with Windows 3 at the end of the 1980s, Apple had the graphical market pretty much to itself.

Apple gets colourful: the Machintosh II ships with a colour display

This would be enough to encourage complacency in some companies, but not Apple, which continued to innovate in a way that would at least partially justify the high prices. The Machintosh II, for instance, wasn’t simply a spec-boost of the original Macintosh. It looked completely different, being housed in a horizontal case that the end user (or an engineer) could open themselves to upgrade the memory, drives and so on. This was a major break from Apple’s established way of doing things, where all previous computers, with the exception of the build-it-yourself Apple I, had been shipped in closed boxes, largely because Jobs saw this as a way of making them more friendly and less threatening.

It was also the first Macintosh to ship with a colour display, and although it’s difficult to imagine what a difference that would make today, we only need to think back to early, mono iPods and compare them to the iPod touch to understand the impact it must have had.

Aside from heading up the development of conventional computers, Gassée also oversaw a lot of Apple’s behind-the-scenes development, where designers were dreaming up new products that would one day drive the company to new heights. Two of the fruits of those labours, the Newton MessagePad and the eMate, were particularly prescient, as they pointed towards Apple’s later dominance of lightweight computing through the iPad and iPhone, but they didn’t see the light of day before Gassée’s own departure from Apple.

His tenure ran from 1981 until the end of the decade, which was the point the focus on highly-priced premium products started to falter. IBM clones were getting cheaper, and with the uptake of Windows and inexpensive desktop publishing applications, even some of Apple’s most loyal customers were tempted to jump ship.

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.

As we’ll see in a later episode, his work with BeOS would come close to bringing Gassée back to the company. For now, though, Apple was focused on trying to win back some of the less wealthy customers by introducing a range of lower-priced computers, including the Macintosh Classic (8MHz processor, integrated mono display, $999), Macintosh LC (16MHz processor, pizza box case, colour capable; the initials stood for LC, but it cost $999 without a display), and Macintosh IIsi (20MHz processor, large desktop case, $2999 without a display).

Today, amongst other things, Gassée writes a blog, here . 

Unsurprisingly, after so many years of waiting, Apple customers lapped up these new, affordable machines, and the company enjoyed a revival. Indeed, by returning to basics, almost literally, Apple was back on the up, and about to wow the world with two of its most radical products ever, as we’ll discover below.

Apple’s decline and IBM and Microsoft’s rise

So Steve Jobs has gone, and so has Jean-Louis Gassée, his successor as head of product development. All in all, the future isn’t looking so bright for Apple at this point in its story. Despite initially being quite successful in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before.

That wasn’t its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 – a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.

Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.

It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today – and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.

Apple’s Quadra and Performa

Apple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).

The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple’s computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).

It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn’t quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing – so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts .

It’s unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we’re used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It’s hypnotic – and it’s hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.

Macintosh Performa 6300

You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia , and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded – and to which it has since returned – had by now been lost.

Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn’t always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.

The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and Motorola

Together, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP – the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).

Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.

Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.

AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.

If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP’s legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.

The PowerPC years

If you bought a new Apple computer any time between 1994 and 2006, you’ll have taken home a PowerPC-based device, the genesis of which we explored above. The fruit of a productive collaboration between Apple, IBM (yes IBM) and Motorola – the AIM Alliance – it was, for a while, one of the most advanced platforms on the planet. Indeed, it proved versatile enough to sit at the heart of everything from the lowly iBook, right up to the mightiest enterprise-focused Xserve.

PowerPC 601 Processor Prototype

The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, and its core technology was based on IBM’s POWER instruction set, so even though it was an innovation of the early-1990s it wasn’t an entirely alien platform for developers coding for the Mac.

This helped make PowerPC a viable alternative to the x86-based processors being shipped by Intel and AMD, which were then dominating the computing market. Even Microsoft shipped a version of Windows NT for PowerPC before scaling back to focus solely on x86 and, later, Freescale.

The first PowerPC-based Macintosh (pre-Mac) was 1994’s Power Macintosh 6100 which, as its name suggests, was based on the 601 processor, running at 60MHz and developed using code that was already familiar to engineers from both Motorola and Apple. As the Quadra’s successor, it was the first machine able to run Mac OS 9, which would likely have been a big enough sales point on its own.

However, perhaps hedging its bets (platform transitions are nerve-wracking projects, after all) it also released a DOS-compatible version, which instead used an Intel 486 processor and allowed Windows and Mac OS to be run simultaneously, effectively doing what VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop do today, and VirtualPC did in the PowerPC line’s latter years.

Power Macintosh 6100

The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename ‘Carl Sagan’. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company ‘Billions and Billions’, which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter ‘B’ when saying the word ‘billions’ so people wouldn’t confuse it with millions.

Although it was never used to market the 7100, Sagan claimed that customers might have considered the codename, which was revealed in a magazine, to imply that he endorsed the product. He wrote to the magazine, asking them to make it clear that he did not, at which point Apple’s development team re-named the computer BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued for libel and lost, with the court ruling that “one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head'” .

Eventually the two parties settled out of court, at which point the 7100 was again renamed, this time to LAW, or Lawyers Are Wimps.

The PowerPC line enjoyed a good innings, but by the middle of this century’s first decade (we’re jumping ahead a bit here to tie-up the PowerPC story), fractures were starting to appear in the alliance and the platform wasn’t evolving quickly enough to keep consumers happy. Apple’s high-end notebook, the PowerBook, was starting to look a little underpowered, and in an effort to push the processor in the Power Mac G5 beyond its native rating, it produced three special editions that employed a sophisticated water cooling system that allowed it to overclock the processor without it overheating.

PowerPC 970FX processor, as used in one of the last Power Mac G5s

Those in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs’ 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.

Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they’d frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, ‘It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. “As we look ahead… we may have great products right now, and we’ve got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come,” 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.”‘

You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they’d have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.

This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard , the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn’t install it by default – you had to add it manually.)

PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it’s a popular choice for embedded processing.

Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC’s dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs’ company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple’s survival.

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.

IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16% over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft’s revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can – including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.

Apple, on the other hand, needs Office. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.

So, a peace has broken out – and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs’ return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn’t really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.

Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. “To create a new standard, it takes something that’s not just a little bit different,” he said in 1984, “it takes something that’s really new, and really captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I’ve seen – is the only one that meets that standard.”

That’s pretty flattering, but there’s a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn’t see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple’s eyes, went on to imitate its products a little too faithfully.

As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox’s implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Windows and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling “our friends up north”.

That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.

Microsoft Windows 1.0

Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.

However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system – such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on – should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.

The court didn’t buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.

Microsoft Windows 2.0

However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they’d been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al’s tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.

Ultimately, Xerox’s act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.

Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.

Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn’t, it’s possible there might be no Mac today. Why? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn’t do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.

Business users wouldn’t switch to a platform that didn’t support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments – particularly those in mixed-platform offices – often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.

So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates , who was then Microsoft’s CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.

In return, Apple unseated Netscape as the Mac’s default browser and installed Internet Explorer in its place, which was actively developed right up until 2003, when in the face rumours that Apple was working on its own browser in house – Safari – Microsoft scaled back its work on IE for Mac to the point where, today, it no longer runs on OS X.

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.

Looking back on it now, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was losing its way. Alongside its computer range, it was producing digital cameras (where it was ahead of most of the big-name players that now dominate photography), video consoles, TV appliances and CD players. It had also invested heavily in the Newton platform to produce the MessagePad and eMate lines.

In many respects, to use a well-worn cliche, it was running before it could walk. Almost all of these products have equivalents in Apple’s current line-up where they form the basis of the iPhone camera, Apple TV, iPad and so on, but in the 1990s there was no way to link them all together. They were, to all intents and purposes, disparate and largely disconnected products; there was no overarching storyline to what Apple was producing the way there is now, where the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and iOS devices can all share data courtesy of iCloud.

To make matters worse, the decision to license a lot of its technologies was only making it harder for Apple to succeed in each marketplace, as it was enabling its rivals to produce cheaper cloned versions of its top-line products. Even the Newton platform wasn’t immune, with Motorola, Siemens and Sharp, among others, using the operating system and hardware spec to build their own products.

Cloning remains a contentious issue in Apple history. Aside from being bad news from Apple’s in-house hardware development, many consumers would say it was actually good for the end user, as it encouraged competition and, as a result, lowered prices. That brought more people to the platform than Apple would have managed to attract on its own, which in turn ensured continued support from application developers, including key names like Adobe and Microsoft, without whom the computer line-up may well have collapsed.

But something had to give – and a decision had to be made, which turned out to be one of the most momentous decisions in the company’s history.

Jobs returns to Apple

Apple was still on the look out for a new operating system, as its in-house efforts weren’t going as well as it had hoped. By 1996 it had shortlisted two possible suppliers: BeOS and NeXTSTEP, each of which had a historical connection to Apple itself.

BeOS was developed by Be Inc, a company founded by former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassée. He had been appointed as Apple’s director of European operations in 1981 and, four years later, was responsible for informing Apple’s board of Jobs’ intention to oust CEO John Sculley – the act that led to Jobs’ departure from the company.

NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, came from NeXT – the company that Jobs founded upon leaving Apple. Although NeXT’s hardware didn’t go on to sell in the quantities that Apple was shipping, it was highly thought of and is perhaps best known as the platform on which Tim Berners Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at Cern.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher for either man – or either company – but in the end Apple chose NeXTSTEP.

If it had been a simple licensing deal that wouldn’t have been so remarkable, but in truth it was far more than that. Apple purchased NeXT itself – not just its operating system – for $429m in cash, plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, effectively buying back Steve Jobs in the process.

The man who had co-founded the company was returning to it after 12 years away.

Making changes

Buying NeXT wasn’t enough to fix Apple’s ongoing woes on its own. Its share price was declining, and over the next six months it fell still further, to a 12-year low.

Jobs convinced the board of directors that the company’s CEO, Gil Amelio, had to go and, when it agreed, it installed Jobs in his place as interim CEO. At that point, Apple began a remarkable period of restructuring that leads directly to the successful organisation it is today.

Jobs recognised that if Apple was going to survive it needed to concentrate on a narrower selection of products. He slimmed down the range of computers to just four – two for consumers and two for businesses – and closed down a lot of supplementary divisions, including the one working on the Newton.

At the same time, he saw that the licensing deals it had signed weren’t doing it any favours, and he brought them to an end. The immediate effect wasn’t good, as it saw the market share of new computers running Apple’s operating system dropping from 10% to just 3% – but at least 100% of them were being built by Apple itself.

The strategy paid off in the long run, though, and Apple’s computers and operating system are holding their own in a world where rivals are seeing year on year stagnation or – worse – decline.

Not everyone was convinced, though. When asked what he would do to fix the broken Apple Computer Inc, Michael Dell, who founded the Windows-based rival that carries his name, told a Gartner Symposium, ‘What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.’

Dell was riding high at the time, but over the years the two companies’ relative positions have changed, and in 2006 Jobs mocked his rival in an email he sent to Apple staff.

“Team,” the email read. “It turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.”

And were things “different tomorrow”?

Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the long run they were very different indeed. Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalisation, while Dell went back to private ownership, as Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought out the existing shareholders.

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Apple is one of the most innovative and cutting-edge companies of modern day. The history of its development is very tumultuous; it had its ups and downs, success and failure, but for all people it is first and foremost a story of a dream that has come true. Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and a person responsible for putting the company at the forefront of other technological businesses, was the one who made it not only a recognizable brand but a product which started being associated with a certain lifestyle. The current paper will analyze the competitive advantages of Apple and sustainability of its competitive position in smartphones. It will also provide an overview and investigation on computer industry in general and explain why Apple struggled historically in PCs. The paper will also describe Tim Cook’s strategy for Apple watch and analyze the approach he used as well as possible corrections that may have been favorable in that case.

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Competitive Advantages of Apple

Originally, the goal of Steve Jobs was not only to produce computers as a cutting-edge tool for progressive people, but also to make them easy to use and beautiful in design. When IBM entered the market with its own PCs it became clear that the approaches towards computers used by these two companies were rather different. Both companies had their own unique competitive advantage. Apple’s leverage in the technological business had been changing and evolving over the years. Firstly, it must be said that from its onset the company used both horizontal and vertical integration, but slowly turned to the latter one which later became one of its key characteristics. What is meant by this is that Apple uses its own hardware and software as well as additional services. The owner of Apple device knows that every little detail of the gadget or technology has been masterfully created and carefully manufactured by the company. Undoubtedly, it is associated with a disadvantage that Apple may not easily implement innovations that penetrate the market, but this fact only forces company to work harder to keep up with the competitors (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Secondly, Apple products are known for their simplicity of both outer design and software. The company’s revolutionary device, the iPhone, was the first simple communication device while the iTunes made music downloading much easier. The introduction of the iPad was also significant in terms of its simplicity since previous devices of this category were rather inconvenient and massive. One more feature that stands out as Apple’s competitive advantage is its lock-in system. It is one of the cleverest marketing strategies since it makes users stick to its products because of iTunes and App Store purchases (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Moreover, Apple not only has a lock-in system as additional software, but also manufactures devices that run on the same operation system, iOS. To stay in the so called digital ecosystem, the customers must be loyal to Apple. Finally, there is one more competitive advantage to be mentioned. Apple’s clever marketing principles made it a luxury brand and turned its customers into the elite of the society. The brand was created gradually by means of using catchy slogans like “Think different” and attractive advertising (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Additionally, Apple was promoted as an eco-friendly business that uses recyclable materials. And, most importantly, its appeal to the youth as a powerful cultural force cannot be denied.

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Overview of Computer History and Apple’s Struggle in PCs

In 1978, Apple introduced Mac to the world bringing about a revolution. But just in three years, in 1981 IBM presented its own operation system which was an open one and therefore had a clear advantage over Apple’s product (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). This was one of the first obstacles Apple encountered on its way. Steve Jobs wanted to preserve the closeness of the system and therefore suffered immense financial losses. Another problem was related to the slow speed of the processor which made Macintosh models of the 80s much less competitive. Between 1985 and 1993, Apple was on its winning streak because it manufactured all hardware, software and peripherals on its own. Due to the design and uniqueness of every element, it was often said in those times that while IBM’s users just tolerated their machines, Mac users adored their computers. In 1990, Apple was a leader in desktop market with its Alduse, but in 1995, the situation changed dramatically with the rise of Windows’ popularity (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). The problem that often resurfaced was that Apple computer product was much more expensive than IBM’s computers (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, but was eventually saved by Steve Jobs. It was done by limiting the quantity of core products from fifteen to just four. As a result, Apple had only Macintoshes for general consumers and professionals in the form of desktop and portable computers. Steve Jobs not only believed that focusing on certain key issues would bring success to the company, but he was also obsessed with secrecy around his innovations. No leak was possible under his supervision (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015).

It historically happened to be so that users of PCs could be divided into several categories. They may be roughly divided based on the purpose they use computers for such as middle business, corporate and personal purposes, government, education and home. Most of the PC users fall into the last category. According to the statistics of 2014, the market leaders in terms of PC manufacturing were Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. Apple’s struggle in PC manufacturing was connected to the fact that its founder, Steve Jobs, wanted his devices to be controlled by hardware and software of his own production (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Another hurdle was related to the lengthy process of Apple’s shift to Intel chips. This was of immense importance for the company since it further allowed it to manufacture thinner and more powerful laptops of lighter weight. This resulted in the birth of Apple’s ultra-thin Mac Air (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). The struggle of Apple in the sector of PCs was related to the fact that it wanted to enter both areas of hardware and software and was not an open system unlike its competitors.

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Apple’s Competitive Position in Smartphones

Apple’s competitive position in the sector of smartphones was obtained due to the three key factors. The first is its sleek and shiny design which immediately attracted users. The second feature that made Apple compatible in smartphones was user interface simplicity. The company has long been emphasizing on the feature of user-friendliness and now it is its most recognizable characteristics. The third aspect that made Apple’s smartphones compatible is its large storage which was made possible with the invention of iTunes (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). The iPhone’s popularity may be explained by its three main features: a breakthrough in communications, revolutionary cell phone and touch control (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Additionally, it offered the user a large variety of applications downloadable for free or for certain amount of money. What Steve Jobs achieved by creating iPhone is largely reinvention of the phone as it used to be. Before the onset of iPhone manufacture, the largest segment of the market was occupied by Nokia, Motorola and Samsung (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). With the birth of the iPhone, the situation changed. Originally, Apple had an agreement with AT&T as an exclusive operator for the smartphone, but soon they understood that “unlocking” phones for other carriers at full price is a better strategy. Lower prices for previous versions of iPhones, subsidies on behalf of the carriers, and design improvement resulted in the fact that 60 percent of Apple’s profits in 2013 were generated from smartphone sector (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Introduction of App Store which made it easier to access and download applications further contributed to the popularity of this communication device. Overall, its light weight, simplicity and sleek design as well as unique user experience made it ever more desirable for the potential customers.

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Tim Cook’s Strategy for Apple Watch

It cannot be stated that Tim Cooks approach towards developing a line of smart watches was completely erroneous, but it had not a perfect timing. At the time, Samsung, Pebble, Google’s Android wear constituted strong rivals for the newly developed wearable technology of Apple (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Apple has always been known as an innovator and after the untimely death of Steve Jobs it was expected of Tim Cook to take the baton passed to him. He was to revolutionize the company and bring something new. Even though Apple watch had fitness-tracking and timepiece functions, as well as a notification option and access to maps, directions, and music player, it was rather expensive (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). Prices ranged from 349 to 17 thousand dollars and competition was already severe (Yoffie & Baldwin, 2015). As a result, Apple’s wearable device did not bring furor as it was expected. There are several corrections that Tim Cook may be advised to include in his search for innovation. Firstly, it may be a good idea for him to invest more time and effort into cloud services sector. Currently they are on the peak of popularity and it may help Apple to develop in that direction. Secondly, Tim Cook may also consider focusing on the hub strategy. The idea of device controlling a smart house sounds revolutionary and this is just what Apple has always been looking for.

To sum up, Apple is one of the companies that had a fair share of success and failures, but in the end occupied its niche in the technological business. Some of its strongest competitive advantages include a brand it created out of its products, simplicity of design and software, lock-in system, and vertical integration. Although Apple struggled historically in PCs manufacturing, it eventually occupied its niche and it is considered a luxurious and innovative computer manufacturer. It has a rather competitive position in the sector of smartphones, the most successful version being iPhone 6 so far. The strategy CEO of Apple, Tim Cook applied regarding Apple watch was a rather successful one but the timing at which it entered the market and rivalry it faced on the part of Pebble, Google’s Android Wear and Samsung was not appropriate.

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Essay: Introduction to Apple Inc.: History, Products, and Organizational Structure

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Part A: Introduction to the Organization and the Organizational Design

Apple Inc. is an American multinational electronics and software company established by Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak on April 1, 1976, in Cupertino, California. Apple designs, manufactures and markets personal computers, portable media players, mobile phones, computer software, computer hardware and peripherals. The Apple Store, which is a retail store owned and operated by Apple Inc., has opened 283 stores as of December 2009, which are located in 10 countries. The company’s products are also sold worldwide through its online stores, its direct sales force, and third-party wholesalers, resellers, and value-added resellers. Music, audio books, iPod games, music videos, episodes of television programs, and movies can be downloaded off the iTunes Store on Mac or Windows computers, and on the iPod Touch and iPhone. Apple’s most popular products include their line of Macintosh personal computers, iPod portable media players, and the iPhone.

Apple Inc. sells its products to individual consumers, small and mid-sized businesses, educators and consumers in enterprise, government, creative, information technology and scientific markets. The company’s total net sales was $36 537 million and they employed approximately 34 300 full-time equivalent employees and 2500 full-time equivalent temporary employees and contractors as of the end of their fiscal year on September 26, 2009.

Apple manages and organizes its business based on a geographical structure, which is one of the divisional structures. The divisional structure is a traditional organization structure which group together people who work on the same product or process, serve similar customers, and/or are located in the same geographical region. In regards to Apple, their geographical structure group together jobs and activities being performed in the same geographical region. The company has created operating segments based on the location and nature of customers. The operating segments are the Americas, Europe, Japan, Asia-Pacific, Retail and FileMaker operations. The Americas, Europe, Japan and Retail operations are Apple’s reportable operating segments. The Americas, Europe, Japan and Asia Pacific segments do not include activities associated with the Retail segment. Asia Pacific includes Australia and Asia, excluding Japan. The Americas segment encompasses North and South America. European countries, the Middle East, and Africa are part of the Europe segment. Regarding the company’s retail segment, these are the retail stores operating in the U.S. and international markets. Similar hardware and software products and services are provided to the same types of customers by each reportable operating segment.

Apple Inc. is such a large corporation that it has all levels of management from upper to lower. The organization has all types of managers including line managers whose work directly contributes to the production of apples goods and services. They also have staff managers who use their special technical expertise to support line workers (marketing, accounting, human resources, and legal services). As shown in the diagram below of how Apple’s top managers are organized, the company has both functional managers, who are responsible for one area of activity, and general managers, who are responsible for complex areas.

This design is appropriate for the organization because their process of creating this geographical structure has appeared to benefit them from their results, which included a 36% gross margin in 2009, and helped them accomplish their mission and objectives. It allows their expertise to be focused on specific customers, products, and regions, which all have unique cultures and different requirements.

Steve Jobs the CEO and Co-Founder of Apple Inc. is known for having a temperamental management style. He has gone against the traditional management style, being strict with employees causing some fear but also praising them. Jobs is a perfectionist who pays close attention to detail, which can drive some of his subordinates crazy from his constant demands. He has a �no compromise” attitude when developing products for Apple. He creates many prototypes and mock-ups which are constantly being edited and revised by being passed back and forth between designers, engineers, programmers, and managers, and then back again. His obsession with excellence has created an amazing development process which turns out great products.

Based on Steve Jobs’s management style I believe he is not following a traditional approach to management. He appears to be following one of the behavioural management approaches, McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y. I believe he has some of the qualities of a theory ‘X’ and theory ‘Y’ manager. Jobs has theory ‘X’ characteristics because he prefers to lead others and expects staff to listen to his commands. His drive to change the world leads him to scream and shout at employees. In contrast, he also has some of the qualities of a theory ‘Y’ manager because he wants his staff to be imaginative and creative and to also be involved by participating in the design process. Jobs believes debating between his employees fosters creativity, therefore he gives creative partners a lot of rope.

In the ever constantly changing environment of the computer/electronics industry, I also see Steve Jobs following the modern management approach of contingency thinking as the competitive environment is always changing. Jobs is always required to understand the situation and respond to it in the appropriate way. Apple is also a learning organization, which is a continuing management theme. The organization continuously changes and improves, using lessons learned from prior experiences. Information sharing, teamwork, participation, and learning are all valued within the company.

Apple Inc. is very modern in everything they do which has caused them to already follow some of the common trends including: shorter chains of command, less unity of command, wider spans of control and more delegation and empowerment. Today, technology companies are starting to not talk about their product, rather the �solutions” or �customer experience” that is offered. The organization is one of the most competitive because it is constantly being one of the first to look to new trends to improve, while others companies are still trying to compete and keep up with Apple’s trends. Trends of today in the technology industry include: the demand for excellence, the pursuit of great design, the instinct for marketing, and the insistence on ease of use and compatibility. These trends have been with Jobs and Apple since the beginning, which has allowed it to succeed in what it has become today. Apple remains the last and only vertical integration company, meaning they make their own hardware and software, which is their greatest strategic advantage.

Through research of Steve Jobs’s management style within Apple Inc, it appears the organization is adaptive. An adaptive organization has more decentralized authority, fewer rules and procedures, less precise division of labour, wider spans of control, and more personal means of coordination. Worker empowerment and teamwork is encouraged within Apple as Jobs believes �talented staff is a competitive advantage that puts you ahead of your rivals.” He likes to work in many small teams, which is a characteristic of an adaptive organization. He does not like teams of more than 100 members because he believes they can become unfocused and unmanageable if they become too large. Members of the organization are encouraged to challenge Jobs’s ideas to foster creative thinking. Adaptive organizations are built upon trust of the employees to get the job down through their own initiative. It is freeing people from control and restrictions and giving them the power and freedom to do what they do best to get the job done; which Jobs allows with his creative partners. The adaptive design works well for Apple Inc.’s competitive environment, which demands flexibility in dealing with the constantly changing conditions. Internal teamwork is encouraged in the company because of the demand for total quality management and competitive advantage.

Areas Where Improvement Could Be Made:

After analyzing Apple Inc.’s organizational design, types and approaches to management, and organizational trends, it appears the design is appropriate for the organization as they are able to accomplish their mission and objectives. As there is always room for improvement in business, Apple can re-engineer some of its processes to design new and better ways to carry out work in the organization. There are many advantages for large organizations that use a divisional structure, disadvantages include: reducing economies of scale and increasing costs through the duplication of resources and efforts across divisions. Rivalries can be created as divisions compete for resources and top-management attention, and divisional needs can take away from the goals of Apple as a whole.

Apple attracts the best highly motivated workers from around the world, therefore I believe it is not necessary for Steve Jobs to be so temperamental, by screaming and shouting at employees. It would improve the organization if he lost his �Theory X” qualities as his preference to lead others and expectations that staff should listen to his commands, can create passive, dependent, and reluctant subordinates who tend to do only what they are told to or required to do. Improving human skills creates a better ability for Jobs and others to work well with each other in cooperation. Less intimidation and threat of job loss in the organization would improve the quality of work life at Apple.

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David Pierce Lauren Goode

The WIRED Guide to the iPhone

It's not just the best-selling gadget ever created: It's probably the most influential one too. Since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, Apple has sold close to 1.5 billion of them, creating giant businesses for app developers and accessory makers, and reimagining the way we live. Millions of people use an iPhone as their only computer. And their only camera, GPS device, music player, communicator, trip planner, sex finder, and payment tool. It put the world in our pockets.

Before the iPhone, smartphones mostly copied the BlackBerry. After the iPhone, they all copied Apple: Most phones now have big screens, beautiful designs, and ever-improving cameras. They even have "notches," or, cut-outs at the top of their edge-to-edge displays, where the phone’s front-facing camera lives.

And the iPhone Effect goes far beyond smartphones. In order to make so many phones, Apple and its competitors set up huge, whirling supply chains all over the world. Those same manufacturers now make the same parts to power drones, smart-home gadgets, wearables, and self-driving cars. They don't look like your phone, but they might not be here without it.

Thanks to the iPhone and the apps developed for it, the world has reorganized itself around the smartphone, and a few people have started to wonder what the iPhone hath wrought. They worry that we spend too much time buried in our phones, heads down, ignoring the people and the world around us.

Social media, in particular, is being questioned. We always always knew that there was an exchange, that if we were using free apps, we were giving up something in return; but now there are concerns about where exactly all that data ends up . We’re becoming accustomed to a sense of undefinable stress, the feeling like there's always too much going on and you can never get away even if you want to. The smartphone is one of the portals into this sometimes-dystopian data vortex.

But at the same time, there’s no denying that the iPhone has utterly transformed our lives—and that anything truly transformational will both solve existing problems and introduce new ones.

Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, on stage at the Macworld conference. He spent nearly an hour explaining the device, extolling the virtues of everything from a touch interface to a huge, desktop-sized version of The New York Times' website that you could pan around. He even made a phone call (how quaint!) and placed what has to be the largest Starbucks order in history to an apparently real barista at an apparently real Starbucks. The whole event stands as a remarkable piece of tech-industry history, and you can still watch it all (on your phone) on YouTube.

The phone didn't come out until six months after that initial reveal, during which time Apple frantically scrambled to turn Jobs' demo into a mass-market gadget . When it finally hit stores in June, people lined up outside stores to buy one. Apple sold 270,000 iPhones the first weekend it was available, hit 1 million by Labor Day, and instantly captured the imagination of phone owners everywhere.

The iPhone 3G, which came out a year later, may have been an even bigger deal. Apple's 2008 iPhone included support for 3G networks, which offered much faster access to email and web pages, and it came at a much lower price. Most important, it added the App Store, which gave developers a way to build and sell software to millions of smartphone owners. The App Store will almost certainly stand as Apple's most important contribution to both the tech industry and society in general, even more than the phone itself. Developers immediately began building apps and games that changed the way we communicate, work, eat, and play. The App Store made way for Instagram, Uber, and Tinder, and it turned the iPhone into the pocket computer it was always meant to be.

From there, the iPhone's story is one of evolution, not revolution . Each year, Apple made the phone bigger and faster, refining the product without changing the basic form factor or its most beloved features. It became more popular every time. From the beginning, Apple seemed to know the camera could be a smartphone's best feature: The iPhone 4 , with its selfie camera and HD video recording, was the biggest thing in cameras since Kodak. Ever since, Apple's cameras have been among the best in their class.

Jobs always said Apple had a five-year lead with the first iPhone. That turned out to be conservative—it took six or seven years for Samsung and others to make truly competitive phones like the Galaxy S and the HTC One. Then, after successfully copying the iPhone, they found their own niches. Samsung bet on pen input and big screens; Google fine-tuned Android and starting shipping its own hardware running optimized versions of the software; and other companies made great phones for a fraction of the iPhone's price. The iPhone was the only best choice for so long, but others finally caught up.

In 2017, the 10th anniversary of that Macworld speech, Apple determined it was time to shake things up a bit with the iPhone. It released the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, solid but unsurprising updates on the same theme that was already established. But it also tried something different, with the launch of the the iPhone X.

Apple ditched the home button in order to make the phone nearly all screen and bet on facial recognition as the key to both your phone and a whole new set of apps and features. (Again: cameras are everything.) It also tried to bring augmented reality into mainstream existence while making your phone and data more secure than ever. And, as a bonus, the iPhone X had the craziest emoji features anyone had ever seen up to that point. The company’s approach was radical, but also, extremely Apple: It was attempting to usher its customers into a new technological world, but it would do it while emphasizing privacy, security, and features that keep you completely locked into Apple.

Despite its high price tag and speculation that the iPhone X’s later ship date would impact sales, it sold respectably well. In the spring of 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the X was the company's most popular device sold every week since its launch in November 2017. But the iPhone X was short-lived as far as smartphones go, because Apple pushed it to the background as soon as the iPhone XS was announced in September 2018.

The current crop of iPhones are, for the most part, iterations. The iPhone XS is the natural successor to the iPhone X. The iPhone XS Max has almost the same footprint as the iPhone 8 Plus, but is equipped with an edge-to-edge display (and, like the other newer iPhones, has no home button or headphone jack).

The new iPhone XR, which shipped a bit later this fall, is Apple’s attempt to appease customers who aren’t happy that the iPhone’s price keeps creeping upwards. The XR’s display technology isn’t as great, and its camera isn’t quite as fancy, but it also costs a couple hundred dollars less than the starting price of the iPhone XS.

Perhaps most notably, all three new iPhone models this year shipped with a new Apple-made mobile processor that’s pushing the boundaries of what mobile processors can be (and do). The A12 Bionic was the first chip available for the mass market with an ultra-efficient 7-nanometer design, and it’s the kind of technology that turns real-time machine learning processes and insanely sophisticated computer vision applications from a concept into reality, right on your pocket computer.

It’s part of a larger attempt by Apple—and the others who have been working on these kinds of mobile chips—to make smartphones smarter. The glass slabs, they’re all starting to look alike. It’s what’s inside them that will set them apart over the next decade.

Apple's in a funny spot right now. Thanks to the huge, insane, impossible success of the iPhone—which accounts for more than half of the company’s revenue—Apple is quite often considered the most valuable company in the world (although Amazon and Microsoft have been vying for this position as well). Of course, it's not like Apple's in any danger as long as it's sitting on hundreds of billions in cash reserves.

But there are plenty of questions about the long-term value of the iPhone, especially since Apple’s annual unit sales of the phone were effectively the same this year as they were last year. Apple has even said that it no longer plans to break out hardware sales by product category, since it’s not representative of the strength of the business. That may be true, but some have interpreted this as Apple trying to cloak what eventually may be a real softness in sales.

All of this just means that if Apple is going to stay on top, it needs to extract more value out of existing iPhone lovers—a strategy it has been aggressively pursuing. It has always billed the Apple Watch as something of a spiritual successor to the iPhone: It's even more accessible, even more personalized, and could take over some of your smartphone's basic functionality. Plus, it’s now a legitimate health tracker .

Same goes for AirPods , which are clearly destined to be more than just a pair of wireless ear dongles that come in a dental-floss case. A follow-up is rumored to be in the works for 2019.

Meanwhile Apple is hell-bent on replacing your laptop with an iPad, sticking an Apple TV under your flatscreen, and making sure you're all-in on Siri and iCloud. It finally released an update to the MacBook Air this year, and while no single component in the new laptop was groundbreaking, it’s something that was almost certainly designed to keep Apple laptop lovers happy. And, Apple is reportedly working on software for self-driving cars and has said repeatedly that augmented reality is the next big thing; perhaps some type of heads-up display is in the works.

As it develops new products, Apple is also looking at ways to help users reset their relationship with their gadgets. It made the iPhone ridiculously enticing; now, it’s actually rolling out software tools so that people can better manage the time spent on their phones and maybe not wind up so addicted. The Screen Time dashboard in iOS isn’t a panacea, but it’s a start.

Whatever the next thing might be, Apple appears uniquely qualified to take advantage. Over the past decade, to keep the iPhone ahead of the curve, Apple has invested billions in building its own chips. Its mastery of its supply chain is unrivaled—it's simply able to build more and better things than anyone else.

Apple's smashing success proved to other big tech companies that the best products come when you make both the hardware and the software. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have all done the same in recent years, building huge gadget businesses on top of their software. The hardware space was once a teeming mass of startups, people raising money on Kickstarter or going to China to build their dreams into a product. Now the business runs mostly through five companies, all of whom learned how to make hardware by watching Apple.

The iPhone didn't just make Apple a metric crap-ton of money: it reoriented the entire tech landscape, helping change the way we work and play. It helped create a new class of mega-corporation, started the world thinking about how everything else might change when it, too, was connected to the internet. Next, Apple has to figure out how the iPhone can improve a user's life instead of consuming it, all while it works on the next crazy design that'll change everything all over again.

Reviewing the First iPhone in a Hype Typhoon WIRED's own Steven Levy was one of just four journalists to review the original iPhone ahead of its launch. For the device's 10th anniversary, he looked back at how important the device was, considered how outrageously excited people were to get one—and remembered all the phone calls from Steve Jobs, wondering how the review was going.

Inside Apple's 6-Month Race to Make the First iPhone a Reality When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January of 2007, he wasn't exactly honest about the state of the thing. The phone Jobs demoed on stage barely worked, and there weren't many others to speak of. For the next 24 weeks, three days, and three hours, Jobs and his team worked desperately to turn the iPhone into a real product for real people. This is the story of that crazy time.

1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame? The iPhone didn't just change the lives of its users. It helped reshape the entire world's manufacturing process, and not always in good ways. In 2011, we sent a reporter to China to meet the people who make your iPhones, and find out how Apple's phone changed their lives, too.

The Hot New Hip-Hop Producer Who Does Everything on His iPhone Steve Lacy made a track on Kendrick Lamar's album, "DAMN," and he did it all on his iPhone. We hung out with Lacy in a weed-clouded studio in Los Angeles, and watched him work in the same way as an entire generation of smartphone-owners: not with knobs and buttons, but with a touchscreen.

Review: Apple iPhone XS and XS Max Our review of the latest model, the iPhone XS and XS Max. They're not the most exciting iPhones ever made, but they're definitely the best ones. If you look carefully, you can even see glimpses of the future.

Review: the iPhone XR When it was announced in September 2018, the iPhone XR was the device that drew the most attention. Sure, the XS was the new shiny hotness, but at $999, maybe it was a little too precious. The XR on the other hand is a device that looks and works like a modern iPhone, but costs $250 less than the top model. So of course people were intrigued. It lacks some of the marquee features of the XS, but it's still a damn great phone for the price.

The Shape of Things to Come From The New Yorker , a profile of Jony Ive (sorry, Sir Jony Ive), Apple's head of design and one of the people most responsible for how the iPhone looks and works.

Plus! The iPhone X and more WIRED iPhone news .

This guide was last updated on March 13, 2018.

Enjoyed this deep dive? Check out more WIRED Guides .

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• Essay on Sales

Apple Company History Essay Example

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Sales , Business , Time , Marketing , Company , Steve Jobs , Computers , Apple

Published: 02/13/2020

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The origin of Apple Company can be traced from 1976, a time when the first machine, Apple I, was created and sold. The company was born through the concerted efforts of Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs. The duo dropped out of college, but luckily ended up securing jobs in companies in Silicon Valley. Wozniak worked for Hewlett-Packard while Jobs worked for Atari. The Apple I was designed by Wozniak. Jobs on the other hand came along and insisted that they both try to sell it. This was actualized on April 1, 1976. However, nothing much of significance was done until 1977. In this particular year Jobs and Wozniak created Apple II which, debuted at a local computer trade show. More importantly, it was the first personal computer to be created using a plastic casing and featuring color graphics. Consequently, it became an impressive machine, boosting the number of orders and hence driving for more to be produced. This was a good sign for the development of the company resulting in production of several machines. In addition, the introduction of an easy to use and affordable floppy drive, Apple Disk II, helped to further improve the sales for Apple Company. Owing to the increasing sales, the company subsequently increased in size by 1980, a time when the Apple III was launched. At this time, the company had employed several thousand employees, and began to get into the international market. Apple had by then brought in a considerable number of experienced managers and investors, who was gladly given the position of the board of directors. Given the collective effort of the new directors, Wozniak, and Jobs, Apple grew to become an actual company to the dismay of many of the initial employees. The exponential growth curve was however interrupted in 1981, when a decline in sales was experienced. The market had become saturated posing a challenge for the Apple Company to continue making a lot sales. This forced the company to lay off some of the employees in order to cut on the costs of operation. Yet another unfortunate occurrence hit apple when Wozniak got injured in a plane clash. He took a leave for some time and then returned for a short time. In March, Jobs took over the chairmanship of the company. The first personal computer to have a graphical user interface was the Apple Lisa. Xerox Corporation at the Palo Alto Research Center was the initiator of the graphical user interface. Jobs purchased a Xerox stock, which impressed him and motivated him in creating the first computer with a graphical user interface. In 1984, the company produced Apple Macintosh and Steve jobs foresaw the creation of software for the Macintosh computer. Software creation was a strategy that Jobs used to win the consumers in the market. Following the introduction of LaserWriter Printer and Aldus Page maker in 1985, the Macintosh computer gained a big boost in sales. In the same year the initial founders left the company where, Wozniak went back to college while Jobs got fired. John Sculley then took over as the CEO for the period up to 1996, when Jobs rejoined the company and took over the CEO position. The final moments of the 90’s saw another of Apple milestone in Computer, after the launching of the iMac. This machine proved to be powerful, user-friendly, and well-designed to reflect the Apple’s improving focus on design and aesthetics. All the subsequent releases of the Mac line feature software such as iLife which, makes it convenient to watch photos and videos, and listen to music. Additionally, the various gadgets from Apple Company have the capability of running all the major operating systems. Apple has continued to create innovative products making it rake in huge profits and wide customer base. The iPod music player and the iPhone have significantly contributed to the company’s development. In particular, these two gadgets are the most sort for by several of the consumers. The driving reason being that they portray aesthetic sleek designs as well as good quality and inspired performance. The country of Pakistan is in the stage of development to become technologically savvy. Introduction of Apple Company to the country would be a milestone in improving the country’s economy in the following sense; first, the revenue garnered from taxation would be injected into the country’s economy. Secondly, most of the citizens would have an opportunity to work in the company, and hence job creation would be a benefit for Pakistan. Owing to the technological advancement in the world, Pakistan would be elicited among the top countries that incorporate technology within their systems. This would ensure that the country remains relevant to the current times as well as helping in improving the delivery of service to its populace. Third, with the availability of the apple gadgets within Pakistan, several citizens would be in a position to afford them given no custom duty would be charged. In return, their lives would be enhanced and improved as service delivery and information exchange would be improved.

Works Cited

Belis, Mary. "Inventors of Modern Computer." 6 March 2010. Inventors. <http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa051599.htm>. Benzingor. "Apple Now Most Valuable Company in History." 21 August 2012. Forbes. Document. 2 September 2013. Sande, Steven. "How America Benefits from Apple." 2 April 2012. TUAW. Document. 2 September 2013. Sanford, Glen. "Company History: 1976-1981." 4 June 2009. Apple-history. <http://apple-history.com/h1>. Silicon valley. Silicon Valley Historical Association. 4 January 2013. Document. 2 September 2013.

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Essay on Apple

500 words essay on apple.

Apple is a sweet and delicious fruit that is very healthy. It is also a good disease-fighter and we can eat it every day. The delicious taste and bright colour of the food make it even more appealing. Moreover, it is a versatile fruit which we can use in many dishes. In an essay on apple, we will learn how many benefits it offers.

My Favourite Fruit

You must have heard that “an apple a day, keeps the doctor away.” I remember hearing this for the first time and I decided to eat an apple every day. Ever since it has become my favourite fruit.

It is round in shape and comes in a red colour. But, there are also green apples. An apple contains a high quantity of juice which is mixed with high fibres. It tastes sweet and is edible for everyone.

As it is one of the healthiest fruit, it is my favourite. I try to eat one every day for the betterment of my health. One single apple contains 130 calories. The insoluble fibre in the fruit is effective for the body because it does not mix with water.

Further, we get apples in many sizes and shapes. We can use it for extraction, skin, chewing and drinking juice. I always carry an apple in my tiffin and share it with my friends as well. With so many benefits it offers, it has become my favourite fruit.

Benefits of Apple

Apples offer many benefits to everyone. The dietary fibre in it is soluble which helps the body to prevent problems of cardiac diseases. Further, they are also helpful to people who suffer from asthma, anaemia and other problems.

They can combat many diseases and dietary fibre which helps to prevent constipation problems. Moreover, it also comes in use for cancer patients to fight this disease . All over the world, there are different kinds of apples which are produced in large numbers.

Apples have many other advantages like reducing weight and keeping the heart-healthy. Similarly, it also reduces the high risk of diabetes. The prebiotic effects offer healthy bacteria which prevents cancer and helps in the growth of bones.

Apples also circulate proper metabolism and maintain the digestive system well. Most importantly, it also offers protection to your brain by vitamins and proteins which are present in it.

It is essential to remember that we must always chew the apple properly so that it does end up harming you instead. With so many benefits it offers, it truly keeps the doctor away if you eat it every day.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Apple

In today’s world, a lot of apples are coming with pesticides inside them. Thus, they need to certified organic now before entering the market. Thus, we must make sure to eat organic apples only. This fruit can never be boring as we can use it in many ways. This nutritional fruit is beneficial for our bodies and gives us the strength to make our body strong.

FAQ of Essay on Apple

Question 1: What vitamin is in apples?

Answer 1: Apples contain a high amount of vitamin C. It is a powerful natural antioxidant that can assist in boosting your body’s resistance to both infectious agents and damage caused by free radicals. Each time we eat an apple, we’ll get a healthy dose of this vitamin and B-complex vitamins.

Question 2: Is eating apples everyday good for you?

Answer 2: Apples are very good for you. Eating them lowers the risk of numerous major diseases, including diabetes and cancer. The soluble fibre content of the apple may promote weight loss and gut health.

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Doris Kearns Goodwin and husband Dick Goodwin lived, observed, created and chronicled the 1960s

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Book Review

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

By Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster: 480 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s” isn’t precisely the book that presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin set out to write.

Dominating this often fascinating volume is both the colossal presence and the sudden absence of Richard “Dick” Goodwin, Doris’ late husband, whose speechwriting talents defined some of the most memorable moments of the 1960s. The couple’s aim was to co-write a book based on his extraordinary archive — 300 boxes! — of personal papers and curios, from voluminous speech drafts to a shattered police club from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Husband and wife spent years perusing and discussing those treasures, an effort short-circuited by his death in 2018, at 86, of cancer. Amid her grief and a move from their rambling home in Concord, Mass., to a Boston condo, Goodwin took up the project on her own.

She describes the result as a hybrid of history, biography and memoir. At its most poignant, “An Unfinished Love Story” is, as the title indicates, an account of personal loss. It also turns out to be a reflection on the process of constructing history, suggesting how time, perspective and stories left unwritten can shape our view of the past.

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Goodwin, the author of award-winning biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and others, has a nice touch as a storyteller. Here she successfully navigates the awkward feat of weaving together the couple’s gently probing conversations, her husband’s archival documentation, other historical sources and her own reporting.

“An Unfinished Love Story” offers a bird’s-eye view of familiar events, and of a decade marked by both idealism and political violence. “Too often,” Goodwin writes, with her characteristic optimism, “memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.”

While arguing for this rosier perspective, the book provides nuance and detail on matters such as the origins of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, Robert F. Kennedy’s private agonies over whether to challenge LBJ for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, and Jackie Kennedy’s emotional struggles after her husband’s 1963 assassination. In a 1966 letter from Hawaii, Jackie addresses Dick Goodwin, her close friend, as a fellow “lost soul” and complains of “memories that drag you down into a life that can never be the same.” That is a sentiment that Doris Kearns Goodwin understands.

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She and the then-married Goodwin — with his “curly, disheveled black hair,” “thick, unruly eyebrows” and “pockmarked face” — met at Harvard in 1972, where she taught a popular course on the American presidency. He had left the Johnson administration in 1965, three years before she joined it, and had become disillusioned with the Vietnam War. Despite having penned her own antiwar piece for the New Republic, she would become an LBJ confidante, an aide on his presidential memoirs and a lifelong admirer.

Not just a speechwriter but a policy advisor and political strategist, Dick Goodwin enjoyed a Zelig-like march through 20th century American history. President of the Harvard Law Review and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Goodwin worked for two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Johnson, and several would-be presidents, including Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. He later wrote the concession speech that Al Gore delivered after the Supreme Court stopped the recount of the 2000 presidential election vote in Florida.

According to his widow, Goodwin idolized the coolly self-possessed JFK, fused with LBJ, regarded McCarthy as “the most original mind” he’d encountered in politics and adored RFK, his best friend of the bunch. (No mention is made here of the seamier side of these politicians’ lives, or how their sexual indiscretions bear on their legacies.)

Nearly every Democratic leader seems to have sought the services of the brilliant, cigar-smoking, workaholic Goodwin. But, as “An Unfinished Love Story” makes clear, he was more than a pen for hire. Goodwin had passionately held views about civil rights, the alleviation of poverty and other issues. As Johnson’s principal speechwriter, he helped fashion both the title and the programs of the Great Society. He was responsible for LBJ’s single most powerful speech, on behalf of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which coopted the anthem of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”

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Goodwin left the Johnson administration, against the president’s wishes, to pursue a solo writing career. Over time, his public stance against American involvement in Vietnam pitted him against his former boss. “It’s like being bitten by your own dog,” Johnson said of Goodwin’s defection.

Goodwin was, at heart, deeply loyal, his widow suggests, even if he sometimes chose loyalty to principles over personal attachments. On the other hand, when a previously hesitant Bobby Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary race against McCarthy, friendship prevailed, and Goodwin switched sides, as he had earlier warned McCarthy he would. The RFK assassination, following victory in the California Democratic primary (and Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder earlier that year), was shattering for Goodwin, as for so many others.

“An Unfinished Love Story” is at its most moving when it touches on the Goodwins’ long, happy, occasionally contentious marriage; its bumpy origins (after becoming a widower, he wasn’t as ready to commit as she was); and his emotional farewell. Always attuned to relationships, Goodwin is an astute chronicler of her own.

Beyond underlining the brighter side of the 1960s, the archive and the conversations it prompted changed the couple’s views of the two presidents they served. She gained a deeper appreciation of the impact of Kennedy’s idealism, she writes, while her husband moderated his long-standing bitterness toward Johnson. Embedded in that rapprochement is an unstated hope: that more knowledge and informed debate might somehow ease our country’s current political polarization as well.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.

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Apple Inc.: Company Overview Essay

Introduction, business summary, risk factors.

Apple Corporation is one of the largest manufacturers of modern technology. It has revolutionized the way we communicate, share and interpret data, and for many of us spend a majority of our personal time. Over the years, this company has become a trailblazer for electronics, starting with the foundation for which this company is built upon, the basic computer. Through this soon to be antiquated piece of equipment, two ambitious young men were able to take transform it into a powerhouse that would inspire others to improve the way we live, work, and play. Through this research, this writer, hopes to gain insight into the success of this business and learn from its current pitfalls.

Apple was officially incorporated in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, two friends who were less than successful as young adults, but their high ambition would prove soon to earn them their fame and billion dollar conglomerate (“The apple revolution,” 2014). Apple I was soon introduced as a basic model with “assembly required” instructions, its successor the Apple II arriving three short years later but much more advanced including colored graphics and a plastic casing (PBS.org, n.d.). As the company expanded, advanced products such as the Macintosh and Power Mac were introduced. However, as Apple grew, so did the competition and the need for new ideas and new products were evident as the company took a huge financial downfall in the late 1990’s (PBS.org, n.d.). Thus, the ipod was born forever changing the music industry.

Apple headquarters is located in Cupertino, California. “As of September 28, 2013, the Company had approximately 80,300 full-time equivalent employees and an additional 4,100 full-time equivalent temporary employees and contractors. Approximately 42,800 of the total full-time equivalent employees worked in the Company’s Retail segment” (UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION [SEC], 2013, p. 9). According to the Nasdaq (2014, para. 1), institutional holdings for this incorporation are as follows:

• Total Number of Holders 2,165
• Total Shares Held 3,708,777,206
• Total Value of Holdings 369,468,385,262
• Net Activity 27,345,752

As of October 6, 2014, stock values are at $99.64 per share with a change volume at approximately 31% (Nasdaq, 2014). Its product line includes its own operating systems, hardware, application software, and services which includes delivery of third-party digital content and applications through the iTunes Store (SEC, 2013).

As a “for-profit” business, the future of Apple will rely heavily upon its ability to maintain products that will benefit the consumer and keep abreast and above its competition. Reportable threats include similar manufactures that have expertise in subfields including technical, marketing, and distribution (SEC, 2013). Their competitors strategy—the ability to produce similar consumer friendly products at a much lower cost. Apple is the only manufacturer of the hardware using OS X, however only holding a minority share in this market (SEC, 2013) Windows remains their biggest competitor in this market.

Any business will need to stay up to date with the latest and greatest in order to satisfy its target audience—the consumer. In addition to its innovative products and services offered, Apple has struggled to keep up with the competition, despite its impressive financial history. Research focused on the needs and wants of the consumer will help keep this company producing products that will take technology even further.

Nasdaq. (2014). Apple Inc. Web.

PBS.org. (n.d.). The history of apple computers. Web.

The apple revolution: 10 key moments. (2014). Time Magazine . Web.

UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION. (2013). Annual report: Form 10 K. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, September 2). Apple Inc.: Company Overview. https://ivypanda.com/essays/apple-inc-company-overview/

"Apple Inc.: Company Overview." IvyPanda , 2 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/apple-inc-company-overview/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Apple Inc.: Company Overview'. 2 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Apple Inc.: Company Overview." September 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/apple-inc-company-overview/.

1. IvyPanda . "Apple Inc.: Company Overview." September 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/apple-inc-company-overview/.

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IvyPanda . "Apple Inc.: Company Overview." September 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/apple-inc-company-overview/.

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The Iowa Great Lakes story is a vibrant quilt woven from the threads of American history: railroad tycoons and boat builders, the U.S.-Dakota War, every beat of American music culture, evolutions in biology, and countless summer memories.

The Okoboji Project Ryan Maris and Emma Myhre

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Welcome to The Okoboji Project!

Why do hundreds of thousands of people flock to a little town in northwest Iowa every summer? The Okoboji Project sits down with historians, story-ellers, and local legends to uncover the rich history of The Iowa Great Lakes. Subscribe to The Okoboji Project newsletter to see bonus content from Okoboji's storied history.

• © 2024 The Okoboji Project

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Apple ipad air (m1) drops to all-time lowest price—but hurry.

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As you’ll doubtless know by now, it looks like Apple will reveal a new iPad Air on Tuesday, May 7, which will go on sale around Friday, May 17. But Best Buy has just launched a very tempting offer on the current model, and it’s at a lower price than it’s ever hit before.

Apple iPad Air 2022. Snap it up for an all-time low price now.

The price is a full $200 off Best Buy’s regular price of $599.99, that is, it’s a full one-third off, meaning the price is down to just $399.99. So, what’s the catch? Well, there isn’t one, but you need to note that this price is only for the Starlight finish. That’s not exactly a hardship—if you ask me, it’s the best-looking color in the range. This is for the model with 64GB storage, and wi-fi connectivity.

You need to move very fast: this offer is only available until the end of the day today, Monday, April 29. Strictly speaking, it runs out at 10 p.m. Pacific, so that’s just a few hours away.

If you want one of the other colors in the range: pink, purple, space gray or blue, then you have more time on your hands. All four are available at a reduced price that goes on longer than just tonight.

But the offer is not as keen: it’s $100 off, that is, $499.99.

So, should you rush to pick this up, or wait until next week for the new model to launch?

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Well, the M1 processor on board is very fast indeed—this is the iPad Air I’ve been using for more than a year now and it’s great. It has Touch ID in the power button, which is arguably the most efficient biometric unlock on the tablet. Certainly, I find it at least as convenient as Face ID on the iPad Pro.

Of course, we don’t know what exciting benefits the next iPad Air might bring, though it looks like it will come in a larger size, with a 12.9-inch display as well as the current 10.9-inch version.

While the next model will undoubtedly be better, it’s hard to knock the performance, design and all-round usability of the current model. If you think the bigger screen of the next version is what you want, then waiting is the right tactic for you. But if you like the size, weight and looks of the current model, and Starlight appeals, then this is a great opportunity to snag a powerful tablet at a remarkable price.

The deal highlighted within this post was selected by the Contributor and does not contain affiliate links.

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History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic

This essay about the evolution of education in America traces its development from the colonial era through the early republic. It discusses the role of education as a necessity and right, shaped by societal changes and legislative actions like the Old Deluder Satan Act. Highlighting figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, it explores the challenges of inequality and segregation, and the transformative impact of educational reforms on American society.

How it works

The rich and evolving story of education in America, from the colonial times to the early republic, is a vivid tale of change, perseverance, and ambition. It is marked by creativity, struggle, and progress, highlighting the journey from modest beginnings to the founding of significant educational institutions that shaped the country’s cultural and intellectual contours.

As early settlers established new lives in the New World’s wilderness, education became a crucial and hopeful necessity. Throughout the early 17th century, improvised classrooms appeared across new settlements, where keen learners pursued knowledge amidst the challenges of frontier existence.

From New England’s coastlines to the southern plantations, the roots of education took hold, integrating deeply with colonial societal structures, though not uniformly.

In the quiet corridors of Puritan New England, education was a revered obligation, a sacred legacy handed down through generations. The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony exemplifies the colonists’ dedication to literacy, requiring schools to be established to counteract the devil’s ploys with education. Nevertheless, the light of knowledge, although bright, was restricted, casting long shadows of inequality.

While some children accessed educational resources, others were sidelined by ignorance. Girls, impoverished individuals, and enslaved people found themselves at the margins of opportunity, their potential stifled by conventional and discriminatory barriers. However, amid adversity, flickers of resistance emerged as marginalized groups fought for their educational rights and autonomy.

The American Revolution brought new possibilities as liberty’s fires inspired a nation. Thomas Jefferson articulated that education should be a universal right, crucial for democracy’s maintenance and the pursuit of happiness. His concept of public education as democracy’s foundation influenced future generations, setting the stage for a more inclusive, egalitarian community.

Nevertheless, the path to progress faced obstacles as the fledgling nation debated issues of identity, equality, and justice. From government corridors to small rural schoolrooms, discussions persisted about education’s role in an evolving society. Eventually, a common understanding developed: education was not just a means to an end but a fundamental human right deserving of protection and investment.

The 19th century saw a burst of educational reform as advocates like Horace Mann pushed for universal public education, championing common schools and teacher education. Nationwide, reformers worked tirelessly to forge a better future, one classroom at a time.

Despite these advancements, significant challenges persisted. Segregation cast a long shadow over the promise of equal education. During the civil rights movement, courageous individuals confronted these prejudices, advocating for justice and equality. Although progress was painstaking, history’s trajectory slowly leaned toward justice, dismantling barriers and opening doors for a new learner generation.

As the 20th century unfolded, American education continued to adapt, influenced by technology, globalization, and societal shifts. From the introduction of progressive education to the expansion of digital learning, teaching tools and methods transformed dramatically, mirroring the changing needs and ambitions of a modern society.

Now, at the dawn of a new era, the influence of America’s early educational system remains significant. It stands as a legacy of resilience, innovation, and optimism—a reminder of education’s transformative power on lives and futures. As we look ahead, let’s use our historical lessons to foster a fairer, more inclusive society for the next generations.

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History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic. (2024, Apr 29). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/history-of-education-in-americas-colonial-and-early-republic/

"History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic." PapersOwl.com , 29 Apr 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/history-of-education-in-americas-colonial-and-early-republic/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/history-of-education-in-americas-colonial-and-early-republic/ [Accessed: 30 Apr. 2024]

"History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic." PapersOwl.com, Apr 29, 2024. Accessed April 30, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/history-of-education-in-americas-colonial-and-early-republic/

"History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic," PapersOwl.com , 29-Apr-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/history-of-education-in-americas-colonial-and-early-republic/. [Accessed: 30-Apr-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). History of Education in America’s Colonial and Early Republic . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/history-of-education-in-americas-colonial-and-early-republic/ [Accessed: 30-Apr-2024]

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