Apple Inc Is an American Multinational Corporation with a Focus on Designing and Manufacturing Consumer Electronics and Software Products
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Contents 1) Inroduction 2) History • 1976–1980: The early years • 1986–1993: Rise and fall • 1994–1997: Attempts at reinvention • 1998–2005: New beginnings • 2005–present: The Intel partnership 3) Business 4) Corporate affairs 5) Advertising 6) Environmental record 7) Criticism Introduction Apple Inc is an American multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing consumer electronics and software products. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of personal computers, the iPod line of portable media players, and the iPhone. Apple's software products include the Mac OS X operating system, iTunes media browser, the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software, and Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio- and film-industry software products. The company operates more than 200 retail stores in eight countries and an online store where hardware and software products are sold. Established in Cupertino, California on April 1, 1976 and incorporated January 3, 1977, the company was called "Apple Computer, Inc." for its first 30 years, but dropped the word "Computer" on January 9, 2007 to reflect the company's ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market in addition to its traditional focus on personal computers. Apple has about 28,000 employees worldwide and has worldwide annuak sales of US$24 billion in its fiscal year ending September 29, 2007. History 1976–1980: The early years Apple was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne,to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips)—less than what is today considered a complete personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at US$666.66. Apple was incorporated January 3, 1977 without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color graphics and an open architecture. By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The Apple II was succeeded by the Apple III in May 1980 as the company competed with IBM and Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market. In 1984, Apple next launched the Macintosh. The Macintosh initially sold well, but follow-up sales were not strong. The machine's fortunes changed with the introduction of the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be offered at a reasonable price point, and PageMaker, an early desktop publishing package. The Mac was particularly powerful in this market due to its advanced graphics capabilities, which were already necessarily built-in to create the intuitive Macintosh GUI. It has been suggested that the combination of these three products was responsible for the creation of the desktop publishing market. As desktop publishing became widespread, Apple's sales reached new highs and the company had its initial public offering on September 7, 1984. Apple's sustained growth during the early 1980s was partly due to its leadership in the education sector, attributed to their adaptation of the programming language LOGO, used in many schools with the Apple II. The drive into education was accentuated in California with the donation of one Apple II and one Apple LOGO software package to each public school in the state. 1986–1993: Rise and fall Having learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple introduced the PowerBook in 1991, which established the modern form and ergonomic layout of the laptop computer. The same year, Apple introduced System 7, a major upgrade to the operating system which added color to the interface and introduced new networking capabilities. It remained the architectural basis for Mac OS until 2001. The success of the PowerBook and other products led to increasing revenue. For some time, it appeared that Apple could do no wrong, introducing fresh new products and generating increasing profits in the process. The magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 and 1991 as the "first golden age" of the Macintosh. During this time Apple experimented with a number of other failed consumer targeted products including digital cameras, portable CD audio players, speakers, video consoles and TV appliances. Microsoft continued to gain market share with Windows, focusing on delivering software with cheap commodity PCs while Apple was delivering a richly engineered, but expensive, experience. 1994–1997: Attempts at reinvention The Apple Newton was Apple's first foray into the PDA markets, as well as one of the first in the industry. By the early 1990s, Apple was developing alternative platforms to the Macintosh, such as the A/UX. The Macintosh would need to be replaced by a new platform, or reworked to run on more powerful hardware. In 1994, Apple allied with IBM and Motorola in the AIM alliance. The goal was to create a new computing platform (the PowerPC Reference Platform), which would use IBM and Motorola hardware coupled with Apple's software. The AIM alliance hoped that PReP's performance and Apple's software would leave the PC far behind, thus countering Microsoft. The same year, Apple introduced the Power Macintosh, the first of many Apple computers to use IBM's PowerPC processor. On November 10, 1997, Apple introduced the Apple Store, tied to a new build-to-order manufacturing strategy. 1998–2005: New beginnings On August 15, 1998, Apple introduced a new all-in-one computer reminiscent of the Macintosh 128K: the iMac. The iMac design team was led by Jonathan Ive, who would later design the iPod and the iPhone. The iMac featured current technology and a groundbreaking design. It sold close to 800,000 units in its first five months and returned Apple to profitability for the first time since 1993. Through this period, Apple purchased several companies to create a portfolio of professional and consumer-oriented digital production software. In 1998, Apple announced the purchase of Macromedia's Final Cut software, signaling its expansion into the digital video editing market. The following year, Apple released two video editing products: iMovie for consumers, and Final Cut Pro for professionals, the latter of which has gone on to be a significant video-editing program, with 800,000 registered users in early 2007. In 2002 Apple purchased Nothing Real for their advanced digital compositing application Shake,as well as Emagic for their music productivity application Logic, which led to the development of their consumer-level GarageBand application. iPhoto's release the same year completed the iLife suite. On May 19, 2001, Apple opened the first official Apple Retail Stores in Virginia and California. The same year, Apple introduced the iPod portable digital audio player. The product was phenomenally successful — over 100 million units were sold within six years. In 2003, Apple's iTunes Store was introduced, offering online music downloads for US$0.99 a song and integration with the iPod. The service quickly became the market leader in online music services, with over 5 billion downloads by June 19th 2008. 2005–present: The Intel partnership In the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address on June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would begin producing Intel-based Mac computers in 2006. On January 10, 2006, the new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to utilize Intel's Core Duo CPU. By August 7, 2006 Apple had transitioned the entire Mac product line to Intel chips, over 1 year sooner than announced. Delivering his keynote at Macworld on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computer, Inc. would from that point on be known as Apple Inc. The event also saw the announcement of the iPhone and the Apple TV. Business Apple was one of several highly successful companies founded in the 1970s that bucked the traditional notions of what a corporate culture should look like in terms of organizational hierarchy (flat versus tall, casual versus formal attire, etc). Other highly successful firms with similar cultural aspects from the same time period include Southwest Airlines and Microsoft. Originally, the company stood in opposition to staid competitors like IBM more or less by default, thanks to the influence of its founders; Steve Jobs often walked around the office barefoot even after Apple was a Fortune 500 company. By the time of the "1984" TV ad, this trait had become a key way the company attempts differentiated itself from its competitors. Corporate affairs Apple has a history of vertical integration in their products, manufacturing the hardware on which they pre-install their software. During the Mac's early history Apple generally refused to adopt prevailing industry standards for hardware, instead creating their own. This trend was largely reversed in the late 1990s beginning with Apple's adoption of the PCI bus in the 7500/8500/9500 Power Macs. Apple has since adopted USB, AGP, HyperTransport, Wi-Fi, and other industry standards in its computers and was in some cases a leader in the adoption of such standards such as USB. FireWire is an Apple-originated standard which has seen widespread industry adoption after it was standardized as IEEE 1394. Ever since the first Apple store opened, Apple has sold third party accessories. This allows, for instance, Nikon and Canon to sell their Mac-compatible digital cameras and camcorders inside the store. Adobe, one of Apples oldest software partners, also sells its Mac-compatible software, as does Microsoft, who sells Microsoft Office for the Mac.