Steve Jobs and the brand Apple

From a small garage in silicon valley (one that is in Los Altos very close to us), one of the world's greatest company's would be created. Stephen G. Wozniak was the one who had the dream of building his very own computer. That dream seemed possible when the first microcomputer, the Altair 8800 came out. Wozniak interned at HP and they were not interested in his design of a microcomputer so he and his former high school classmate, Steve Jobs, created their own computer in Steve's garage. Their first product: The Apple I. It was completely handbuilt and designed by Wozniak and later was shown at the Homebrew computer club. Later, The Apple II was introduced into the market and was also completely designed and built by Wozniak. The Apple II finally gave consumers a computer that could allow them to venture into the world of computing. It appealed mainly to the amateur programmers. Their following creations included the Macintosh, which sold below Apple's expectations. It was also during this time that Steve Jobs was kicked out of his own company by CEO John Sculley because of Apple's poor sales figures. John Sculley was former CEO of Pepsi-Cola who Steve asked to become CEO of Apple. When Steve left, he started another company NeXT, which stumbled and failed because it could not sell its specialized operating systems. Apple would later buy NeXT for 429 million and take Steve back as CEO of Apple.


When Steve Jobs came back, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. The day Steve Jobs came back, he put Apple back on the path to success. He worked with a new management team, changed stock options, and self-imposed a 1 dollar salary a year. Along with these actions, his effective marketing campaigns and his stylish designs caught consumers' attention again. With the help of his new designer, Jonathan Ives, the iMac became a hit and the company sold 800000 in the first 5 months. Apple then proceeded to buy up and expand itself into many different categories of tech such as the music and mp3 market. They released their iPod, 1000 songs in one's pocket, which was insanely popular, over 100 million units sold in the first 6 years of its release. The company would release the Macbook Air, which was presented in a yellow mail envelope at launch to demonstrate how thin and compact it was for a fully functioning computer, the iPhone which was revolutionary and sold 270000 units in the first 30 hours of sales. Apple went from making computers to making mobile devices for consumers and it has been doing extremely well. Apple was introducing technology that its competitors did not have and it greatly advanced the company's progress. In 2009, Steve Jobs took a medical absence leave to focus on his personal health. He had pancreatic cancer and could not work much. Despite that, he still launched the iPad, another product that was innovative and so popular that within the first day, 300000 units were sold and 500000 by the end of the week. Following that, In May of the same year, Apple's market cap exceeded that of competitor Microsoft for the first time since 1989.

Sadly in 2011, Steve Jobs died which marked the end of an era for Apple. Because of his death, Phil Schiller introduced iBooks Textbooks for iOS and iBook Author for Mac OS X in New York City. Apple then released the iPhone 4s and iPhone 5 which featured Siri and many more new features. Tim Cook is now the leader of Apple and had to deal with a lawsuit between Samsung and Apple about intellectual property. Much more has happened to Apple such as acquiring Beats Electronics which helped produced many music-related products such as speakers and headphones and earbuds.

Whether you like Apple and Steve Jobs or not, there is a lot of respect for the brand and how far it has gotten. A quote from Jobs himself, "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower" really shows the mindset he had for Apple and what he wanted to accomplish.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.
https://www.biography.com/business-figure/steve-jobs
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apple-Inc/Desktop-publishing-revolution
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-macintosh-on-january-24-1984-and-changed-the-world----eventually
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/audio/a27421503/ipod-20000-dollars/
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook-air-core-2-duo-1.6-13-specs.html
https://thenextweb.com/apple/2017/09/11/every-prediction-original-iphone-sucked/