Apple Computer

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Template:Sprotect Template:Applecomputer Apple Computer, Inc. (Template:Nasdaq and Template:Lse) is an American computer technology company. Its headquarters are located at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, part of Silicon Valley. Apple was a major player in the personal computer revolution in the 1970s.

The Apple II microcomputer, introduced in 1977, was a hit with home users. In 1983, Apple introduced the first commercial personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI), the Lisa. In 1984, Apple introduced the revolutionary Macintosh. The Macintosh (commonly called the "Mac") was the first successful commercial implementation of a GUI, which is now used in all major computers.

Apple is known for its innovative, well-designed hardware and software, such as the iPod and the iMac, as well as the well-known iTunes application (originally part of the iLife suite) and Mac OS X, its current operating system.

Contents

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History

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1975 to 1980 - The founding of Apple

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Founding and Apple I

The rise of Apple Computer is one of America's great success stories. Based on the business and technical savvy of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the marketing expertise of Mike Markkula, Apple dominated the personal computer industry from 1977 to 1983.

Jobs and Wozniak, ("the two Steves") had been friends since 1972. Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in assembling a personal computer and selling it. Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, who, after Jobs' famous persuasion, ordered fifty units and paid $500 for each unit. 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 another friend, Ronald Wayne, assembled the Apple I.

Apple Computer was thus founded in Los Altos, California on April 1, 1976 (and incorporated January 3, 1977) by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at $666.66. They were hand-built in Jobs's parents' garage, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.

The Apple I was delivered in June, and paid for on delivery. Eventually, 200 Apple I computers were built.

Note that the original Apple I was simply a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips), not a full computer as we know it today.

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The Apple II

The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire.

The Apple II was one of three personal computers launched in 1977. Despite its higher price, it quickly pulled away from the other two, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, to lead the pack in the late 70s and to become the symbol of the personal computing phenomenon.

Unlike the TRS-80, the Apple II was of high quality and featured a number of technical advantages. It had an open architecture, used color graphics, and most importantly, had an elegantly designed interface to a floppy disk drive, something only mainframes and minis had used for storage until then.

Another key to success was the software: the Apple II was chosen by entrepreneurs Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world — the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. That created a phenomenal business market for the Apple II; and the corporate presence attracted many software and hardware developers to the machine. (See the timeline for dates of Apple II family model releases—the 1977 Apple II and its younger siblings, the II Plus, IIe, IIc and IIGS.)

More than 2 million Apple II's were shipped at a price of $970 for the 4KB model.

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Apple III

By now, 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. An updated version was introduced in 1983 but it was also a failure due to bad press and discouraged buyers. Nevertheless, the principals of the company persevered with further innovations and marketing.

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The IBM PC

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).

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1981 to 1989 - Lisa and Macintosh

Image:Ad apple 1984.jpg

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Xerox PARC

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 one million dollars in pre-IPO Apple stock (approximately $18 million net).

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The Lisa

Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface (GUI), and decided to take over design of Apple's first project, The Apple Lisa, to produce such a machine. 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 Job'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 graphical user interface (GUI), named the Lisa. However, the Lisa was a commercial failure as a result of its high price tag ($9995) and limited software titles.

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The 1984 commercial

In 1984, drawing upon its experience with the Apple Lisa, Apple Computer next launched the Apple Macintosh. Its debut was announced by a single broadcast of the now famous $1.5 million television commercial, "1984", based on George Orwell's novel 1984. The commercial was directed by Ridley Scott and aired during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Steve Jobs' intention with the ad was to equate Big Brother with the IBM PC and a nameless female action hero, portrayed by Anya Major, with the Apple Macintosh.

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The Mac

While it 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.

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Windows

In anticipation of the Macintosh launch, Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, was given several Macintosh prototypes in 1983 to develop software for the "Mac." While the company was indeed ready with its BASIC and the MultiPlan spreadsheet at the Macintosh's launch, in 1985, Microsoft launched Microsoft 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.

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Sculley, Jobs, and NeXT

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 asked to resign from the company. Jobs then 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.

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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. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer, both of desktop and now portable machines.

The same year, Apple introduced a massive upgrade to the Macintosh operating system, 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.

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Downturn

The continuing development of Microsoft Windows eventually resulted in an interface that many people thought was close enough or even superior to the Macintosh in terms of ease of use and overall look and feel. Combined with low-cost hardware and an improving software suite, an increasing number of potential customers turned to the "Wintel" standard instead.

Apple, relying on their high profit margins to maintain their massive R&D budget, never developed a clear response. Instead they decided that Windows was too close, and 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 (which never caught on). 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 with meaningless names and arbitrary model numbers ("Quadra 840", "Performa 6116"), but failed to adequately differentiate one model from another. The costs involved in developing such a wide variety of products, coupled with some highly-publicized product recalls and the growing popularity of Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows 95, led to the near-bankruptcy of Apple.

While at one time the industry hung on every word from Apple, by the middle of the 1990s, many considered the company to be irrelevant.

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1994 to 1997 - Attempts at reinvention

By the mid-1990s, 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 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's were 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 OS. NeXTstep was chosen, and this supplied the platform for the modern OS X.

On February 4, 1997, Apple completed its purchase of NeXT and its NeXTstep operating system, thus bringing Steve Jobs back into Apple. 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, despite an outstanding decade of innovation. Jobs stepped in as the interim CEO and began a critical restructuring of the company's product line.

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1998 to 2005 - New beginnings

Image:Steve Jobs with iMac.jpg In 1998, a year after Jobs had returned to the company, Apple introduced a new all-in-one Macintosh (echoing the original Macintosh 128K): the iMac, a new design that eliminated most Apple-standard connections like SCSI and ADB in favor of two USB ports. While technically not impressive (it was aimed at a general market), it featured an innovative new design - its translucent plastic case, originally Bondi Blue and white, and later many other colors, is considered an industrial design hallmark of the late-90s.

The iMac design team was led by Jonathan Ive (who later also designed the iPod). The iMac proved to be phenomenally successful, with 800,000 units sold in 1998, making the company a profit that year of $309 million - Apple's first profitable year since Michael Spindler took the position of CEO of the company in 1993. The Power Macintosh was redesigned along similar lines, and continues to evolve to this day.

At the National Association of Broadcasters Apple purchased the Final Cut software from Macromedia, beginning their entry into the digital video editing market. 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 NEXTSTEP and BSD Unix. Aimed at consumers and professionals alike, OS X aims 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 OS 9, the new operating system allowed the use of Mac OS 9 applications through 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 re-compile.

Image:Applecomputerheadquarters.jpg 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.

In late 2001, Apple introduced its first iPod portable digital audio player, a move that has proven to be phenomenally successful with over 42 million units sold even though it was not originally perceived to be a successful product.<ref>BBC News story on Apple's first quarter 2006 earnings report</ref> Combined with a scheme to offer downloadable songs at US 99 cents per song through Apple's ITunes Music Store, there had been over 1,000,000,000 downloads for iPod players by February 2006<ref>Steve Jobs' January 2006 MacWorld keynote address</ref>.

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 as well, this completed Apple's collection of consumer and professional level creativity software, with the consumer-level applications being collected together into the iLife suite.

With the introduction of the Power Mac G5 in June 2003, Apple abandoned flashy colors in favor of white polycarbonate for consumer lines such as the iMac and iBook, as well as the educational eMac, and anodized aluminum or titanium for professional products like the Power Mac G5, PowerBook G4 and MacBook Pro, as well as the low-cost Mac mini.

On March 10, 2005 Apple Computer announced its support for Sony's Blu-Ray technology and joined the Blu-ray Disc Association, or BDA. In a keynote address on June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs officially announced that Apple would begin producing Intel-based Macintosh computers beginning in 2006.<ref>Apple press release Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006</ref> Jobs confirmed rumors that the company had secretly been producing versions of its current operating system Mac OS X for both PowerPC and Intel processors for the previous five years, and that the transition to Intel processor systems would last until the end of 2007. Mac OS X is based on OPENSTEP, an operating system originally available for many platforms. Apple's own Darwin, the open source underpinnings of OS X, is also compiled for Intel's x86 architecture.<ref>See articles from news.com, Apple insider, and The New York Times</ref>

Jobs surprised the industry at Macworld 2006 however, by announcing the first Intel based Apple computers would begin selling in 2006 and that the transition would be complete by the end of 2007.

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2006 to present - Start of the Intel era

Image:MacBook Pro.jpg Template:Main On January 10, 2006, Apple released its first Intel chip computers, a new notebook computer known as the MacBook Pro (a 15.4 inch laptop which replaced the PowerBook G4 line and offers a 4X speed improvement) and a new (though identical) iMac with a 2-3 times faster performance increase. Both used Intel's Core Duo chip technology.

On February 28, 2006, Apple introduced the new Intel-based Mac mini, running up to 4X faster and also featuring Front Row, available with a Core Duo or Core Solo (single core) processor. The current operating system, OS X Tiger 10.4, runs natively on the new Intel machines, as do many applications, such as iLife '06. Other applications, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, compiled for the PowerPC, run in emulation mode, using a technology known as Rosetta. Unfortunately, Rosetta causes software to run at a considerably slower pace than many would like. Programs compiled only for the PowerPC will have to be recompiled to run at full speed on the new Intel machines.

On the other hand, the Intel chip allows the new machines to run the Windows operating system. On March 16, 2006 a bootloader CD image[1] and a how-to for getting XP on your MacBook Pro, iMac, or mini was released to the Internet as an entry into a $13,000 contest. Many hackers attempted over months to win the prize by becoming the first to run Windows natively on a new Intel Mac. The Intel-based Macintoshes are now the only Apple computers capable of running both Mac OS and Windows (and Linux) without emulation. Further, on 5 April 2006, Apple announced a new software product - Boot Camp - which allows a user with an Intel Mac to dual boot into Windows XP complete with a full range of drivers for Apple hardware. The new Boot Camp (name not finalized) will also be included, as standard, in Apple's next OS Release (10.5 - Leopard). This new release can be compared to the iPod's beginning of compatibility with Windows-based machines. In 2003, the iPod went from Mac only to Mac and Windows. After this sales and popularity increased immensely.

The Intel-based machines do not support Classic (as it has not been translated to x86 binaries), so applications that run only in Mac OS 9 and earlier will not run on these machines.

All Macintosh product lines are expected to transition to Intel processors by the end of 2006. The Apple online store sold out of 17-inch iMac G5 computers in February 2006, Apple ended the life of its 15 inch PowerBook G4 on Wednesday the 22nd of February 2006, and the G4 Mac mini was removed from the Apple online store on the 28th of February 2006 and replaced with the Intel Core Mac mini. On the 10th of March, 2006 Apple ended the life of the 20" G5 iMac, bringing a close to the iMac G5 era.

The Apple/Intel partnership coined several catch-phrases among Apple fanatics and parts of media. Some of the most widespread ones include "Mactel" and "Macintel", a response to the phrase "Wintel" which is an informal moniker that describes all Intel-powered systems running the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, these monikers were not used seriously by Apple itself.Template:Fact

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Current products

Image:Ipod 5th Generation white.jpg

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Hardware

Apple introduced the Apple Macintosh family in 1984 and today makes consumer, professional, and educational computers. The Mac mini is the company's consumer sub-desktop computer, introduced in January 2005 and designed to motivate Windows users to switch to the Macintosh platform. The iMac is a consumer desktop computer that was first introduced by Apple in 1998, and its popularity helped save the company from bankruptcy. Now in its third design iteration, the iMac is similar in concept to the original Macintosh in that the monitor and computer are housed in a single unit. The Power Mac G5, Apple's desktop computer for the professional and creative market, is a member of the Power Macintosh series first introduced in 1994. The eMac is/was Apple's cheaper alternative to the iMac for the education market. Apple's server range includes the Xserve, a single-processor, dual-processor, and cluster-node server range, and the Xserve RAID for server storage options.

Apple introduced the iBook consumer portable computer as a companion to the iMac; it is Apple's lowest cost portable computer. The MacBook Pro is the professional portable computer alternative to the iBook intended for the professional and creative market and replaced the PowerBook range. PowerBooks are still being manufactured and sold, but is expected that Apple will phase out both the PowerBook and iBook lines upon arrival of the heavily rumored MacBook, the low end version of the MacBook Pro and Intel-based version of the iBook. The Powerbook range was first introduced in 1991 and helped Apple's profits increase during the 1990s.

In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod digital music player and currently sells the iPod (with video), available in 30 and 60 GB models; the iPod nano, available in 1 GB, 2GB and 4 GB models; and the iPod shuffle, available in 512 MB and 1 GB models.

Image:Mac mini Intel Core.jpg Apple sells a variety of computer accessories for Macintosh computers including the iSight video conferencing camera, the AirPort wireless networking products; Apple Cinema HD Display and Apple Displays computer displays; Mighty Mouse and Apple Wireless Mouse computer mice; the Apple Wireless Keyboard computer keyboard and the Apple USB Modem.

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Software

Apple independently develops computer software titles for its Mac OS X operating system. Much of the software Apple develops is bundled with its computers. An example of this is the consumer-oriented iLife software package which bundles iDVD, iMovie HD, iPhoto, iTunes, GarageBand, and iWeb. Both iTunes and a feature-limited version of the QuickTime media player are available as free downloads for both Mac OS X and Windows. For presentation and page layout, iWork is available.

Apple also offers a range of professional software titles. Their range of server software includes the Mac OS X Server operating system; Apple Remote Desktop, a remote desktop control application; WebObjects, Java Web application server; and Xsan, a Storage Area Network file system. For the professional creatives market, there is Aperture for professional RAW-format photo processing; Final Cut Studio, a video software package, as well as Final Cut Express HD, a cut-down version, for SD and HD video editors; Logic Pro, a comprehensive music toolkit, and Logic Express, its prosumer cousin; and Shake, an advanced effects composition program.

Apple also offers online services with .Mac which bundles .Mac HomePage, .Mac Mail, .Mac Groups social network service, .Mac iDisk, .Mac Backup, .Mac Sync, and Learning Center online tutorials.

See also:
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Corporate affairs

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Logo

See also: , the unicode Apple logo.

Image:Apple first logo.jpg Image:Striped apple logo.png Image:Apple-logo.png

The original Apple logo was designed by Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne and depicts Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. However this design was soon to be replaced by the now famous rainbow apple with a "bite" taken out of it. It was one of a set of designs Rob Janoff presented to Jobs in 1976 <ref>Wired News: Apple Doin' the Logo-Motion</ref>.

In the book Zeroes and Ones, author Sadie Plant speculates that the rainbow Apple logo was a homage to Alan Turing, the homosexual father of modern computer science who committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple in imitation of the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This seems to be an urban legend as the Apple logo was designed two years before Gilbert Baker's rainbow pride flag, and did not follow the same color pattern.

In 1998, the logo became single-colored, though no specific color is prescribed; for example, it is grey on the Power Mac G5, Mac Mini, and Apple iMac, blue (by default) in Mac OS X, chrome on the 'About this Mac' panel and the boot screen in OS X 10.3 and 10.4, red on many Software packages, and white on the iBook, PowerBook G4 and MacBook Pro. The logo's shape is one of the most recognized brand symbols in the world, and is featured quite prominently on all Apple products and retail stores, and notably included as stickers in nearly all Macintosh packages through the years.

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Criticism

Apple was criticized for its vertically integrated business model, which runs against the "received wisdom" of some economists, particularly those who study the computer industry. However, the company is profitable. Others criticize the company by suggesting it has been personality-driven, especially during the two eras of Steve Jobs' tenure. Some even regard the company as a cult or at least having cult-like features. Jobs' charisma, infamously referred to as his reality distortion field, has drawn criticism.

From a technical standpoint, Apple was also criticized for having a closed and proprietary architecture with the original Macintosh and refusing to adopt open standards; for many years a "Not Invented Here" (NIH) culture seemed to prevail. The iTunes Music Store continues this trend, utilizing a proprietary digital rights management system called FairPlay that requires burning and re-ripping a CD to place purchased songs on any digital audio player besides the iPod.

That trend was largely reversed with Mac OS X, and the company now has an official policy of adopting relevant open industry standards. Mac OS X is based on a free software / open source software kernel and core operating system called Darwin. Apple also uses an open source framework called WebKit in its Safari web browser.

Apple has used industry-standard hardware technologies for many years. Many Apple technologies have also become industry standards where no former standard existed, for example Bonjour zero-configuration networking, and FireWire. Some non-Apple technologies only gained wide industry acceptance after Apple adopted them, including 3.5-inch floppy disks, SCSI, the Universal Serial Bus (USB), Wi-Fi and, of course, graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Apple has recently adopted an Intel-based architecture. Apple's industry-standard software implementations include iCal, as well as a host of other networking protocols.

Open source software advocates are often critical of Apple's attempt to appeal to their particular movements. Such advocates claim that such a marketing scheme is not taken seriously enough by Apple because Mac OS X has many proprietary technologies in essential areas. Other open source advocates make a counter-argument that Apple has done much more for open source software than many other major commercial software developers by releasing large portions of source code to the public through the Apple Public Source License (APSL). Some third-party developers are also critical of the competing factions within Apple itself, noting an apparent rivalry between the developers of Cocoa, which came from NeXT, and those of Carbon, which came from Apple. This rivalry is seen as counterproductive and unnecessary by many developers.

Apple's retail initiative has had a mixed reception despite its success promoting the Apple brand. Retailers have suggested that Apple-owned retail stores receive preference when receiving Apple hardware, obtaining limited stock product earlier and at lower prices. This accusation is denied by Apple.


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Apple CEOs, 1977-present

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Current Apple Board of Directors

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Current Apple executives

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Corporate culture

Apple was the first company to demonstrate that suits and hierarchy were not only unnecessary to success, they might actually be a hindrance to innovation. As a result, Apple's corporate "counterculture" has been widely copied in the technology industry. 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 differentiated itself from its competitors. Today it is almost a given that a high-tech startup cannot hope to attract top talent without a flexible, casual work environment free of dress code and rigid structure, offering plenty of opportunities for stress relief and creative play. Template:Fact

As the company has grown and been led by a series of chief executives, each with his own idea of what Apple should be, some of its original character has arguably been lost, but Apple still has a reputation for fostering individuality that reliably draws talented people into its employ. Template:Fact

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User culture

See Also: Cult of Mac

Some Apple customers are devoted to the brand. Some refuse to buy from competitors and stridently uphold their belief in the perceived superiority of Apple products; according to surveys by J. D. Power, Apple has the highest brand and repurchase loyalty of any computer manufacturer. While this brand loyalty is considered unusual for any product, Apple appears not to have gone out of its way to create it. At one time, Apple evangelists were actively engaged by the company, but this was after the phenomenon was already firmly established. As Guy Kawasaki has said, "[the brand fanaticism was] something that was stumbled upon."<ref>The father of evangelism marketing by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba</ref>

Macintosh users meet at the Apple Expo and MacWorld Expo trade shows where Apple introduces new products each year to the industry and public. Many users show their loyalty and devotion by wearing Apple t-shirts. Another example of Apple's user culture is the Apple Store openings where many wait and sleep outside of stores for days prior to their openings.

John Sculley, former Apple CEO, told the Guardian newspaper in 1997: "People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company, It was the marketing company of the decade.".<ref>Wired News: Apple: It's All About the Brand</ref>

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Notable litigation

Template:Main Apple's earliest court action dates to 1978 when Apple Corps, The Beatles-founded record label, filed suit against Apple Computer for trademark infringement. The suit settled in 1981 with an amount of $80,000 being paid to Apple Corps. As a condition of the settlement, Apple Computer agreed to stay out of the music business. The case arose in 1989 again when Apple Corps sued over the Apple IIGS, which included a professional synthesizer chip, claiming violation of the 1981 settlement agreement. In 1991 another settlement of around $26.5 million was reached. <ref>news.com: Apple vs. Apple: Perfect harmony?</ref> In September 2003 Apple Computer was sued by Apple Corps again, this time for introducing iTunes and the iPod, which Apple Corps believed was a violation of the previous agreement by Apple not to distribute music. <ref>legalzoom.com: Apple v Apple: What is at the core of The Beatles’ Apple Records vs. Apple Ipod…</ref> The trial began on March 27, 2006 in the UK and is now in progress. At the present time the Beatles' songs are not available for download from any legal music download sites, including the iTunes Music Store.

In 1982 Apple filed a lawsuit against Franklin Computer Corp., alleging that Franklin's ACE 100 personal computer used illegal copies of Apple's operating system and ROM. Apple v. Franklin established the fundamental basis of copyright of computer software. When developing the Macintosh, Apple decided to embed a "smoking gun" in its firmware to make it easier to detect copying, and the original Macintosh shipped with an encrypted "Stolen from Apple" icon in ROM.

In 1988 Apple sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on the grounds that they infringed Apple's copyrights on a GUI, particularly design elements such as the "Trash." The Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. trial lasted for four years. The ruling was decided against Apple, on the grounds that Apple had actually (unintentionally) licensed the intellectual property to Microsoft as part of the agreement that gave Microsoft early access to the information necessary to develop Macintosh software, and the concept of a GUI was no longer the domain of Apple alone.

In July 1998 Abdul Traya registered the domain name appleimac.com, two months after Apple announced the iMac, in an attempt to draw attention to a web-hosting business. <ref>news.com: Teen in dispute with Apple over domain</ref> After a legal dispute that lasted until April 1999, Traya and Apple settled out of court with Apple paying legal fees and giving Traya a "token payment" in exchange for the domain name. <ref>macobserver.com: Battle For Domain Name Between Apple And Teen Resolved</ref>

In 1994 Apple was sued by the astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan for using his name as the internal code-name for the Power Macintosh 7100. Sagan lost the suit twice. See the Carl Sagan article for details.

In November 2000, Benjamin Cohen of CyberBritain registered the domain name "itunes.co.uk" for an MP3 search engine. Apple was granted a UK restricted (non music) trademark for ITUNES on March 23, 2001, and launched its popular iTunes music store service in the UK in 2004. In 2005, Apple took the matter to the Dispute Resolution Service operated by .uk domain name registry Nominet UK, stating that they had rights in the name "iTunes". An expert decided in Apple's favor in the dispute. Cohen launched a media offensive stating that the DRS was biased towards large businesses and made frequent threats of lawsuits against Nominet.

In November 2004, two popular weblog sites that feature Apple rumors publicly revealed information about an unreleased Apple product code-named "Asteroid", also known as "Project Q97". The sites, "AppleInsider" and "PowerPage", were subpoenaed for information about their sources in the Apple v. Does case. In February 2005 it was decided by a court official in California that the bloggers do not have the same shield law protection as do journalists. In a related case, the websites went on to fight the journalistic status decision. In a separate matter, Apple filed a lawsuit against website Think Secret in January 2005, claiming that the site's reports about forthcoming Apple products violated trade secret law.

In May 2005 Apple entered into a class action settlement <ref>http://www.appleipodsettlement.com</ref>, upheld on December 20, 2005 following an appeal, regarding the battery life of iPod music players sold prior to May 2004. Eligible members of the class are entitled to extended warranties, store credit, cash compensation, or battery replacement.

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