Start of a Revolutionary Company
Apple Computer Company started on April 1st of 1976 when it was founded by three people, Steve Jobs was one of them. The first device that they came up with was Apple I. It was completely designed and made by Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of the company, and went on sale in the July of the year 1976 with a hefty price of $666.66. That amount nowadays would be around $3000, which is typical for an Apple product.
In the year 1977 Apple Computer Company only had two founders left, because twelve days after co-founding Apple Ronald Wayne sold his shares in the company to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for a small amount of $800 losing all rights to the company. It was a huge mistake on his part because already in the time from the year 1977 to the year 1980 yearly sales reached the amounts of 118 million dollars.
In December of the year 1980 Apple went public with its shares and sold 4.6 million shares making 100 million dollars for Apple by the end of the day, the price of the stocks rose from $23 to $29 per share making huge amounts of people millionaires. By the end of the day, Apple’s market cap had reached 1.7 billion dollars.
A Revolutionary Idea from Steve Jobs
Whilst Apple was working on multiple new projects, Steve Jobs came up with a revolutionary idea that would change how we perceive computers. He was convinced that every computer is going to need a graphical user interface(GUI). Apple started working on developing GUIs, but the results were not that successful at the beginning and the success only came with later product releases that included a mouse and a graphical user interface.
Steve’s Comeback to the Company
In the period from the year 1991 to year,1997 Apple was in a huge decline in sales and was close to facing bankruptcy because of the competition that other computer software and hardware companies were creating in the market. To save the company Apple had to make some changes in their products so they purchased a company called NeXT to gain rights to their operating system called NeXTSTEP and mainly to bring back Steve Jobs, who at that time was working with NeXT. When Jobs returned to his founded company he was working only as an advisor, but on July 9th of yeah 1997, he replaced Gil Amelio because of his crippling of the company’s finances. Jobs worked intensively together with talented Jonathan Ive to reconstruct the company and make it successful again.
Launch of the iPhone
In the year 2007, Steve Jobs announced that the company will no longer be called “Apple Computer Incorporated” but will be called “Apple Inc.” because the main goal of the company was no longer to produce only computers but to shift focus to making consumer electronics. Also with the announcement came another new product from Apple called the iPhone. In the first 30 days of the launch, Apple had sold 270 thousand units of the iPhone. Products like iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad received widespread success all over the world and brought innovation in the field of technology
Passing of Steve Jobs
In August of 2011, Steve Jobs resigned his position as chief executive of Apple and became Apple’s chairman. At the time Steve Jobs had already been fighting a rare form of pancreatic cancer for 7 years and he knew that he could pass away any time soon on October 5 of the year 2011 at the age of 56 Steve Jobs passed away leaving a huge scar in the company.
A Company Without its Founder
After Steve Jobs passed away, his place as the CEO of Apple was taken by Tim Cook, and still led by him till nowadays. Tim Cook continued Apple’s legacy and Apple continued to release new products. The first product that got released after Steve Jobs had passed away was iBooks, a reinvented way to have textbooks and access to educational materials. After that followed a release of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. Surprisingly the passing of Jobs didn’t affect product sales hugely and Apple sales kept growing year by year at a rate that Apple had reached a total world-record value of 624 billion dollars by the end year 2012.
Fans Without Their Idol
As years passed, loyal Apple product fans from the days of the Steve Jobs era lost their trust and loyalty to the company because Apple had lost its innovativeness in the releases of new products and most of the products did not feel the same in value as they were before. Some say that it is because no one can replace Steve Jobs and his innovative mind and blame the failure of Apple to impress new fans with Tim Cook.
Occasionally Apple still manages to release products that excite their fans or cater the society with their demands, but as years have passed the number of product sales has not increased by a lot, and other companies like Samsung which has been a huge rival to Apple since the releases of Samsung’s line of mobile devices and Huawei which in the recent years has overtaken Apple in the amounts of sales.
It seems like Apple will continue to work like they have worked in the past years since the passing of Steve Jobs and keep releasing ridiculously overpriced products which i lot of times can not even outperform products that competitors of Apple offer for much lower prices.
