Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley, best known for its consumer electronics, software and online services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Company by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, the company was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. the following year. It was renamed to its current name in 2007 as the company had expanded its focus from computers to consumer electronics. Apple is considered part of the Big Tech group, alongside Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta.

The company was founded to market Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Its successor, the Apple II, became one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputers. Apple introduced the Lisa in 1983 and the Macintosh in 1984 as some of the first computers to use a graphical user interface and a mouse. By 1985, internal conflicts led to Jobs leaving the company to form NeXT and Wozniak withdrawing to other ventures; John Sculley served as CEO for over a decade. In the 1990s, Apple lost considerable market share in the personal computer industry to the lower-priced Wintel duopoly of Intel-powered PC clones running Microsoft Windows, and neared bankruptcy by 1997. To overhaul its market strategy, it acquired NeXT, bringing Jobs back to the company. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability by introducing the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices; creating the iTunes Store; launching the "Think different" advertising campaign; and opening the Apple Store retail chain. Jobs resigned in 2011 for health reasons, and died two months later; he was succeeded as CEO by Tim Cook.

Apple's product lineup includes portable and home hardware like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV; several in-house operating systems such as iOS, iPadOS, and macOS; and various software and services including Apple Pay and iCloud, as well as multimedia streaming services like Apple Music and Apple TV+. Since 2011, Apple has for the most part been the world's largest company by market capitalization, and, as of 2024^[update], is the largest manufacturing company by revenue, the fourth-largest personal computer vendor, the largest vendor of tablet computers, and the largest vendor of mobile phones. Apple became the first publicly traded US company to be valued at over $1 trillion in 2018, and, as of September 2025^[update], is valued at just over $3.47 trillion.

Apple has received criticism regarding its contractors' labor conditions, its relationship with trade unions, its environmental practices, and its corporate ethics, including anti-competitive tactics, materials sourcing, and its acquisitions of smaller businesses. Nevertheless, the company has a large following and enjoys a high level of customer loyalty. It has consistently been ranked as one of the world's most valuable brands since the late 2000s.

Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne as a partnership. The company's first product was the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak. To finance its creation, Jobs sold his Volkswagen Bus, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator. Neither received the full selling price but in total earned $1,300 (equivalent to $7,200 in 2024). Wozniak debuted the first prototype Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club in July 1976. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips—a base kit concept which was not yet marketed as a complete personal computer. It was priced soon after debut for $666.66 (equivalent to $3,700 in 2024). Wozniak later said he was unaware of the coincidental mark of the beast in the number 666, and that he came up with the price because he liked "repeating digits".

Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated in Cupertino, California, on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who had left and sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 only twelve days after having co-founded it. Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 (equivalent to $1,297,000 in 2024) to Jobs and Wozniak during the incorporation of Apple. During the first five years of operations, revenue grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to US$118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533%.

The Apple II, also designed by Wozniak, was introduced on April 16, 1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differs from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because of its character cell-based color graphics and open architecture. The Apple I and early Apple II models use ordinary audio cassette tapes as storage devices, which were superseded by the 5+1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive and interface called the Disk II in 1978.

The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first killer application of the business world: VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program released in 1979. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II: compatibility with the office, but Apple II market share remained behind home computers made by competitors such as Atari, Commodore, and Tandy.