happy 40th, mac
Apple, the world’s largest company, this week celebrated the 40th anniversary launch of its legendary Apple Macintosh. Few organisations transform whole industries and fewer still do it several times, but how exactly did Steve Jobs’ Apple grow into the almost $4trn behemoth it is today?
In 1975, Steve Wozniak, a young gifted Californian engineer who was devoted to the earliest personal computers, started attending meetings of Palo Alto’s Homebrew Computer Club. Inspired, he designed and hand-built a device which transpired to be the first desktop computer using a typewriter-like keyboard and a regular TV screen. Realising its commercial potential he tried, and failed, to sell the idea to his then-employer, Hewlett Packard, but his friend from the club, Steve Jobs, showed no such reticence, recognised its potential, and the Apple Computer Company was born. A third founder, Ronald Wayne, sold his 10% stake for a reputed $500, just twelve days after the company was formed. Today, the stock would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Ouch.
The following year, the sleek, user-friendly, ‘ready-to-run’, groundbreaking Apple II was launched and subsequently went on to sell over six million units. It also debuted the distinctive logo which was drawn from Jobs’ time working in an Oregon orchard. When the company floated in 1980, it was the largest IPO since Ford Motors and made the two Steves a cool $250m each.
However, all was not cider-and-roses and 1984’s Apple Mac, faced with competition from cheaper IBM-compatible PCs, sold poorly (in spite of Ridley Scott’s famous 1984-themed cinematic advert) and the following year the board forced him out. He allegedly walked away $100m and one single Apple share. The company continued to flounder and by 1997 was losing over a billion dollars a year. Jobs, who had spent the interim years successfully building another high-end computer company, NeXT, was brought back in as CEO and Apple’s imperial purple-patch began.
His first act was to scrap the vast majority of the company’s projects and focus all available resources on its next PC, the iMac. Launched the following year, the translucent, highly-coloured device became the biggest-selling and must-have computer in the US. A run of genuinely iconic products followed: the iPod (2001); the iPhone (2007); the iPad (2010). Apple was not the first organisation to market with a portable digital music player, a smartphone or a tablet, but its design, build-quality and ease-of-use propelled the products to the mainstream and into the public’s consciousness. Furthermore, it heralded Apple’s transition from a computer company to a consumer electronics firm, and oversaw the development of, an arguably even greater innovation, the App Store. The first iPhone had no non-Apple applications but today there are several million available, each providing a hefty 30% commission upon download.
Sales of its products have now peaked but Apple retains such a firm grip over how we communicate, entrain ourselves, shop and do business that it no longer appears to have to rely on revolutionary inventions to keep its turnover humming along very nicely thank-you. Its continued dominance appears assured and the founders’ foresight, technical nous, commercial ability and design flair has served them well.
