Apple: Company background and products

1 Company background and products

Apple Computer, Inc. was founded in 1976 in Cupertino, a small town near San
Francisco, CA by two college students, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak. The
company was a pioneer in the computer industry and their Macintosh II computer is
credited as the first modern personal computer. Apple experienced a strong growth
during the ‘80s, however, due to some wrong decisions (mainly a closed architecture
approach to computing) it lost the so-called “War of Desktops”, thus leading to a
long decline that lasted until the late ‘90s, when Jobs stepped back at head of the
company he founded.

During the second Jobs era the company tried to reinvent itself; it renewed
completely its product line and entered new markets following its philosophy of
offering high integration between hardware and software and superior industrial
design.

Nowadays Apple designs and manufactures personal computers, portable digital
music players and mobile communication devices and produces and sells a variety of
related software, services and peripherals. On January 9th, 2007 Steve Jobs
announced during a keynote that Apple would be known from that point on as Apple,
Inc. in order to reflect its commitment to a whole “Digital Lifestyle” range of
products, rather than merely to the PC business.