Intelligence: 40 Fast Facts on Apple

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• Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, friends from Silicon Valley who had worked at HP and Atari, respectively.
• The company dropped "Computer" from its name in 2007, reflecting its role as a consumer-electronics and lifestyle powerhouse.
• Woz designed the computer kit that became the Apple I; Jobs convinced him to build a business around it.
• The friends showed their work at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist hotbed in Menlo Park.
• Jobs had dropped out of Reed College, and reportedly dropped acid, too; he found spiritual enlightenment on a trip to India.
• Woz had attended Berkeley; he later returned to earn a degree.
• A third co-founder, Ronald Wayne, sold his 10% stake in the company for $800 in 1976.
• Apple went public in 1980 at a split-adjusted price of $2.75 per share; today's market cap is about $200 billion.
• Apple is now a $50 billion company, based on annualized revenue.
• The company accounts for less than 10% of the personal computer market, but dominates the premium-price segment.
• The Apple II, launched in 1977 and later running the seminal VisiCalc spreadsheet, vaulted the young company to success.
• Many of the ideas that drove Apple's popularity originated at Xerox PARC, which Jobs and colleagues visited in 1979.
• The business-targeted Apple III crashed upon launching in 1980.
• Woz crashed a private plane upon take-off in 1981, and soon thereafter ended his active role in the company.
• Woz sponsored the US Festival in 1982 and 1983. Performers included David Bowie, The Grateful Dead, U2, and The Clash.
• Two decades later, Apple's iTunes store remade the music business in the digital era.
• The Apple Lisa was the first to commercialize a GUI in 1983, but it tanked in the marketplace.
• The famous "1984" ad, directed by Ridley Scott, ran during Super Bowl XVIII; it cast Apple as the daring challenger to convention.
• John Hodgman, the PC in the long-running "I'm a Mac" ad campaign, uses a Mac.
• The product introduced by the 1984 ad was called the Macintosh. As software and peripherals became available, the GUI machine sold well.
• Jobs credited a calligraphy course at Reed with inspiring some of the Mac's elegant features.
• In 1985, Jobs attempted a coup against the company's designated grown-up, former Pepsi CEO John Sculley; Jobs lost and resigned instead.
• Jobs then founded NeXT, which was acquired by Apple in 1996, bringing the prodigal son home again.
• After his return, Jobs became interim CEO. He dropped the "interim" from his title in 2000, and kept the job after his 2009 leave for a liver transplant.
• The charismatic, demanding Jobs "would have made an excellent king of France," said the late Apple employee Jef Raskin.
• Jobs once dated Joan Baez and reportedly kept a motorcycle in the living room of his unfurnished mansion.
• Jobs hired I.M. Pei to renovate an enormous apartment in NYC's swank San Remo, but sold it to Bono many years later without ever occupying the place.
• During his interregnum, Jobs acquired the business that became Pixar; he's a major shareholder and boardmember of its eventual acquirer, Disney.
• Apple's first quarterly loss came, along with big layoffs, in 1985. The company endured losses again in the mid-'90s and the early '00s.
• The 1980s saw a protracted fight with Microsoft over the rights to GUI design. Microsoft won.
• Desktop publishing and the education market helped keep Apple in the game as Windows grew to dominate PC sales.
• The ill-fated, before-its-time Newton PDA became an early '90s punchline, but the costly project was no joke to Apple shareholders.
• Muddled product strategy tarnished the brand and helped push Sculley out the door; Jobs replaced Gil Amelio, who replaced Michael Spindler, who replaced Sculley.
• The Jobs renaissance saw a licensing agreement with arch-enemy Microsoft, an end to low-cost clones, the birth of iMac, and a new OS.
• Acquisitions and new products made Apple a digital production powerhouse and put it at the center of what it calls the digital lifestyle.
• The Cube, a monitor-less computer, was the biggest failure of the second Jobs era.
• Apple has been in the retail store business since 2001.
• The first iPod appeared in 2001, launching an Apple-driven reboot of the music and consumer electronics industries.
• The iPhone, introduced in 2007, worked similar magic on the mobile computing and communications world.
• The wildly successful AppStore has been criticized as a walled garden that gives Apple too much control over developers and users.