Apple
Monday, December 25, 2006
Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL, LSE: ACP) is an American computer technology corporation with worldwide annual sales in its fiscal year 2005 (ending 24 September 2005) of US$ 13.9 billion.[3] The company has 14,800 employees in several countries. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Apple develops, sells, and supports a series of personal computers, portable media players, computer software, and computer hardware accessories. The company's best-known products include the Macintosh line of personal computers, the Mac OS X operating system, the iPod portable music player, and the iTunes Store.
Apple operates retail stores in the United States, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom. The stores carry most of Apple's products as well as many third-party products and offer on-site support and repair for Apple hardware and software.
For a variety of reasons, ranging from its philosophy of comprehensive aesthetic design to its countercultural, even indie roots as a company that differentiates itself from the rest of the industry by “thinking different,” Apple has cultivated a customer base that is unusually devoted to the company and its brand.
History
Apple has revolutionized personal computing since its founding in 1976. The Apple II microcomputer, introduced in 1977, was a hit with home users. In 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, the first commercial personal computer to employ a graphical user interface (GUI), which was influenced in part by the Xerox Alto. Lisa was also first personal computer to have the mouse. In 1984, the Macintosh was introduced, furthering the concept of a user-friendly graphical user interface. Apple's success with the Macintosh became a major influence in the development of graphical interfaces elsewhere, with major computer operating systems such as Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST, appearing on the market within two years of the introduction of the Macintosh.
In 1991, Apple introduced the PowerBook line of portable computers. The 1990s also saw Apple's market share fall as competition from Microsoft Windows and the comparatively inexpensive IBM PC compatible computers that would eventually dominate the market. In the 2000s, Apple expanded its focus on software to include professional and prosumer video, music, and photo production solutions, with a view to promoting their computers as a "digital hub". It also introduced the iPod, the most popular digital music player in the world as of August 2006.[4]
[edit] 1975 to 1980: The early years
Apple was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne[5] (and later incorporated January 3, 1977[6] without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak) to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at US$666.66. They were hand-built in the garage of Jobs' parents,[7] and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.[8] Eventually 200 computers were built. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips) - not what is today considered a complete personal computer.[9] The user was required to provide two different AC input voltages (the manual recommended specific transformers), wire an ASCII keyboard (not provided with the computer) to a DIP connector (providing logic inverter and alpha lock chips in some cases), and to wire the video output pins to a monitor or to an RF modulator if a TV set was used.[10]
Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty units and paid $500 for each unit after much persuasion from Jobs. Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor. Using a variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items including a Volkswagen Type 2 bus, Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak and Ronald Wayne assembled the Apple I.[citation needed]
The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. Despite a price higher than competitors, it quickly pulled away from its two main rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, to become the market leader (and the symbol of the personal computing phenomenon) in the late 70s due to its color graphics, high build quality, and open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, this was quickly superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.
Another key to success for Apple was software. The Apple II was chosen by programmers Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world—the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and the corporate market attracted many more software and hardware developers to the machine, as well as giving home users an additional reason to buy one—compatibility with the office. (See the timeline for dates of Apple II family model releases—the 1977 Apple II and its younger siblings the II+, IIe, IIc, and IIGS.)
By the end of the 1970s, Jobs and his partners 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 struggled to compete against IBM and Microsoft in the lucrative business and corporate computing market. The designers of the Apple III were forced to comply with Jobs' request to omit the cooling fan, and this ultimately resulted in thousands of recalled units due to overheating.[11] An updated version was introduced in 1983, but it was also a failure due to bad press and wary buyers. Nevertheless, the principals of the company persevered with further innovations and marketing.
In the early 1980s, IBM and Microsoft continued to gain market share at Apple's expense in the personal computer industry. Using a fundamentally different business model, IBM marketed an open hardware standard created with the IBM PC, which was bundled with Microsoft's MS-DOS (MicroSoft-Disk Operating System).
Apple's sustained growth during the early eighties was in large part due to its leadership in schools around the world, particularly with its marketing of Apple Logo, developed by Logo Computer Systems Inc.(LCSI) of Montreal, Canada. The majority of the first computers entering schools around the world were Apple II's with Apple Logo. 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. The deal concluded between Steve Jobs and Jim Baroux of LCSI, and having required the support of Sacramento, established a strong and pervasive presence for Apple in all schools throughout California. The initial conquest of education environments was critical to Apple's acceptance in the home where the earliest purchases of computers by parents was in support of children's continued learning experience.
Based on the marketing and technical savvy of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the business expertise of Mike Markkula, Apple dominated the personal computer industry from 1977 to 1983.
[edit] 1981 to 1989: Lisa and Macintosh
Jobs and several other Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Alto computer. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for selling them US$1 million in pre-IPO Apple stock (approximately US$18 million net).
Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a GUI, and decided to take over design of Apple's first project, the Apple Lisa, to produce such a machine. The Lisa was named after Jobs' daughter (however, a backronym, Local Integrated Software Architecture, was coined). He was eventually pushed from the group due to infighting, and instead took over Jef Raskin's low-cost computer project. Branding the new effort as the product that would "save Apple", an intense turf war broke out between the Lisa's "corporate shirts" and Jobs's Macintosh "pirates", both teams claiming they would ship first and be more successful. In 1983 the Lisa team won the race, and Apple introduced the first personal computer to be sold to the public with a GUI. However, the Lisa was a commercial failure as a result of its high price tag (9,995 USD) and limited software titles.
In 1984, drawing upon its experience with the Lisa, Apple next launched the Macintosh. Its debut was announced by a single national broadcast of the now famous US$1.5 million television commercial, "1984", based on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The commercial was directed by Ridley Scott and aired during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Jobs' intention with the ad was to represent the IBM PC as Big Brother, and the Macintosh as a nameless female action hero portrayed by Anya Major. While the Macintosh initially sold well, follow-up sales were not particularly 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 (DTP) package. The Mac was particularly powerful in this market due to its advanced graphics capabilities, a side-effect of the GUI, and it can be said that the combination of these three products are responsible for the creation of the DTP market. As DTP became widespread, Apple's sales reached a series of new highs.
In anticipation of the Macintosh launch, Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, was given several Macintosh prototypes in 1983 to develop software. While the company was indeed ready with its BASIC and the MultiPlan spreadsheet at the Macintosh's launch, in 1985 Microsoft launched Windows, its own GUI for IBM PCs using many of the elements of the Macintosh OS. By 1990, Windows 3.1 was a usable alternative to the Macintosh.
An internal power struggle developed between Jobs and new CEO John Sculley in 1985. Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley, and Jobs was removed from his managerial duties. Jobs later resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc., a computer company that built machines with futuristic designs and ran the UNIX-derived NeXTStep operating system. Although powerful, NeXT computers never caught on with buyers, due in part to their high purchase price.
[edit] 1989 to 1991: The Golden Age
Having learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple turned to industrial designers and adopted a product strategy based in three portable devices. One portable was built by Sony, which had a strong reputation for designing small, durable and functional electronics devices. Sony took the specs of the Mac Portable, put in a smaller two-hour battery, a much smaller (physically) twenty megabyte hard drive and a smaller nine-inch passive matrix screen.
Called the PowerBook 100, this landmark product was introduced in 1991 and established the modern form and ergonomic layout of the laptop computer.[citation needed] This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer, both of desktop and now portable machines.[citation needed] The same year, Apple introduced a massive upgrade to the Mac OS, in the form of System 7. Although resource-hungry (for the era), System 7 dramatically improved the Macintosh experience, adding color to the interface, simplifying common operations, and introducing a number of powerful new networking capabilities. System 7 would be the basis for the Mac OS until 2001.
The success of the PowerBook and several other Apple products during this period led to increasing revenue. The computer press listened to Apple press releases with rapt attention, and speculation was rife about what projects from Apple's famed Advanced Technology Group would next come to market. Apple merely had to mention a technology, Taligent for instance, for people to christen it the "new standard". For some time, it appeared that Apple could do no wrong, introducing new products that were the best on the market, and generating increasing profits in the process. The magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 to 1991 the "first golden age" of the Macintosh.
The continuing development of Microsoft Windows eventually resulted in an interface that many people thought was superior to the Macintosh in terms of ease of use and overall look and feel. Combined with a huge base of low-cost computers and peripherals and an improving software suite, an increasing number of potential customers turned to the "Wintel" standard instead.
Apple, relying on high profit margins to maintain their massive R&D budget, never developed a clear response. Instead they sued Microsoft for theft of intellectual property. The lawsuit dragged on for years before finally being thrown out of court. Worse, the lawsuit distracted management while a deep rot developed within the engineering ranks, which became increasingly unmanageable. At first there was little outward sign of the problem, but a series of major product flops and missed deadlines destroyed Apple's reputation of invincibility.
At about the same time, Apple branched out into consumer electronics. One example of this product diversification was the Apple QuickTake digital camera, one of the first digital cameras brought to the consumer market. A more famous example was the Newton, coined a PDA by Sculley, that was introduced in 1993. Though it failed commercially, it defined and launched the new category of computing and was a forerunner and inspiration of devices such as Palm Pilot and PocketPC.
During the 1990s, Apple greatly expanded its computer lineup. It offered a multitude of models ("Quadra 840av", "Performa 6116"), but many felt Apple failed to adequately differentiate one model from another and the cost of supporting so many products adversely affected profitability. Apple lost market share to Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows 95 - a major turning point in the history of the rival Windows operating system.
[edit] 1994 to 1997: Attempts at reinvention
By the mid-90s, Apple realized that it had to reinvent the Macintosh in order to stay competitive in the market. The needs of both computer users and computer programs were becoming, for a variety of technical reasons, harder for the existing hardware and operating system to address.
In 1994 Apple surprised its loyalists by allying with its long-time competitor IBM and CPU maker Motorola in the so-called AIM alliance. This was a bid to create a new computing platform (the PowerPC Reference Platform or PReP), 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, which had become Apple's chief competitor.
As the first step toward launching the PReP platform, Apple started the Power Macintosh line in 1994, using IBM's PowerPC processor. This processor utilized a RISC architecture, which differed substantially from the Motorola 68k series that had been used by all previous Macs. Apple's OS was rewritten so that most software for the older Macs could run on the PowerPC series (in emulation).
Throughout the mid to late 1990s, Apple tried to improve its operating system's multitasking and memory management. After first attempting to modify its existing code, Apple realized that it would be better to start with an entirely new operating system and then modify it to fit the Macintosh interface. Apple did some preliminary work with IBM towards this goal with the Taligent project, but that project never produced a replacement operating system. A new internal effort, Copland, ran afoul of Apple's now uncontrollable engineering and became a massive failure. A new attempt was made with the Gershwin operating system.
They then investigated using Be's BeOS, NeXT's NeXTSTEP OS, and also Microsoft's Windows NT. NeXTSTEP was chosen, and this supplied the platform for the modern Mac OS X. On February 7, 1997, Apple completed its purchase of NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system, thus bringing Steve Jobs back into Apple.[12] On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors after overseeing a 12-year record-low stock price and crippling financial losses. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO and began a critical restructuring of the company's product line.
On November 10, 1997, Apple announced a new online retail store, based upon the WebObjects application server the company had acquired in its purchase of NeXT. The new direct sales outlet was also tied to a new build to order manufacturing strategy, and announced at the same time as new machines using the G3 PowerPC processor.
[edit] 1998 to 2005: New beginnings
On August 15, 1998, Apple introduced a new all-in-one Macintosh reminiscent of the original Macintosh 128K: the iMac. The iMac design team was led by Jonathan Ive, who later designed the iPod. While technically unimpressive, it featured an innovative new translucent plastic exterior, originally in Bondi Blue, but later many other colors. The iMac proved phenomenally successful, selling close to 800,000 units in its first five months and significantly boosting the company's revenue and profitability. Thanks in part to the iMac, fiscal 1998 was Apple's first profitable year since 1993. The iMac is now considered an industrial design icon of the late 90s.
At the National Association of Broadcasters convention, Apple purchased the Final Cut software from Macromedia, beginning its entry into the digital video editing market, and signaling a return to application development after a decade long policy of delegating non-system software to its Claris subsidiary. iMovie was released in 1999 for consumers, and Final Cut Pro was released for professionals in the same year. Final Cut Pro has gone on to be a significant video-editing program. Similarly, in 2000 Apple bought Astarte's DVDirector software, which morphed into iDVD (for consumers) and DVD Studio Pro (for professionals) at the Macworld Conference and Expo of 2001.
In 2001, Apple introduced Mac OS X, the operating system based on NeXT's OPENSTEP and BSD Unix. Aimed at consumers and professionals alike, Mac OS X sought to marry the stability, reliability and security of the Unix operating system with the ease of use afforded by a completely overhauled user interface. To aid users in moving their applications from Mac OS 9, the new operating system allowed the use of OS 9 applications through Mac OS X's Classic environment. Apple's Carbon API also allowed developers to adapt their OS 9 software to use Mac OS X's features often with a simple recompile.
In May 2001, after much speculation, Apple announced the opening of the Apple retail stores, to be located in major U.S. consumer locations. These stores were designed for two purposes: to stem the tide of Apple's declining share of the computer market and to counter a poor record of marketing Apple products by third-party retail outlets. The company faced challenges to balance the deployment of its own retail stores with its dependence on, and the demands of, its existing channel partners and dealers.
On October 23, 2001 Apple introduced its first iPod portable digital audio player and released it on November 10 of that year, a product that has proven phenomenally successful. Nearly 60 million units have been sold even though it was not originally perceived to be a successful product.[13] Apple's iTunes Store was introduced soon after, offering online music downloads for US 99¢ a song and integration with the iPod. The service quickly became the market leader in online music services, with over 1.5 billion downloads by September 2006.[14]
In 2002 Apple purchased Nothing Real and their advanced digital compositing application Shake, raising Apple's professional commitment even higher. In the same year they also acquired Emagic, and with it, obtained their professional-quality music productivity application Logic, which led to the development of their consumer-level GarageBand application. With iPhoto's release in 2002, this completed Apple's collection of consumer and professional level creativity software, with the consumer-level applications being collected together into the iLife suite.
Apple progressively abandoned flashy colors in favor of white polycarbonate for consumer lines such as the iMac and iBook, as well as the educational eMac, and metal enclosures for the professional lines. This began with the 2001 release of the titanium PowerBook and was followed by the 2001 white iBook, the 2002 flat-panel iMac, the 2003 Power Mac G5 and the 2004 Apple Cinema Displays. Divergent to this consumer/professional identity, the low-cost Mac mini has an aluminum case while featuring the distinctive white polycarbonate top.
posted by E @ 11:00 PM,
