Apple

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, remembered as the two Steves, first met in mid-1971 when mutual friend Bill Fernandez introduced twenty-one-year-old Wozniak to sixteen-year-old Jobs. Their first partnership was the blue-box business: Wozniak built the tone devices after reading an Esquire article, once using one to call the Vatican while posing as Henry Kissinger, and Jobs managed to sell some two hundred of them at $150 apiece, splitting the profit evenly. By 1975 both had left their universities and were attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where machines like the Altair 8800 inspired Wozniak to build a microprocessor into his video terminal design. Priced-out of the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 chips, he waited until MOS Technology released its $20 6502 in 1976, wrote a BASIC for it, and adapted his paper design; by March 1, 1976, the machine that became the Apple I was working, and Jobs immediately saw its commercial potential where Wozniak had intended to share schematics for free.

The iPod's development history credits Tony Fadell, who had shopped a music-player concept elsewhere before finding support at Apple and was hired in 2001 to run the project, code-named P-68. Jon Rubinstein had already secured the crucial component, discovering Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive during a supplier meeting in Japan and purchasing rights to it for Apple, where rivals' players relied on 2.5-inch drives; he had also progressed the screen and battery. With most Apple engineers busy on the iMac line, Fadell hired veterans from General Magic and Philips, partnered with PortalPlayer on the software, and had a working prototype within eight months. The physical design drew on Dieter Rams's 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio, the wheel interface on Bang & Olufsen's BeoCom telephone. Jobs set an exacting standard for the device's physical design, contracting Pixo to build the user interface under his direct supervision. Copywriter Vinnie Chieco named it, inspired by the pod-bay line from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The iPhone began in 2000 with Jobs's objection to the stylus. Envisioning an Apple touchscreen product a user could operate directly with fingers, he decided the device required a triple-layered capacitive multi-touch screen, then a very new and advanced technology, which would eliminate both the physical keyboard and the mouse, and he recruited a group of Apple engineers to investigate the idea as a side project. When Jobs reviewed the prototype and its interface, he saw the potential to turn the concept into a mobile phone competing in the emerging touchscreen market. The full effort, called Project Purple 2, began in 2005; Apple had quietly registered the iphone.org domain in December 1999. The development history records an eight-month secret collaboration with Cingular Wireless, estimated at $150 million over thirty months, in which Apple rejected the design-by-committee approach that had produced the failed Motorola ROKR E1 and instead was given liberty to develop the hardware and software entirely in-house.

The Apple Store chain was founded by Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson, with its first two locations opened on May 19, 2001. The move followed years of failed store-within-a-store concepts: seeing the need for better retail presentation of Apple's products, Jobs began an effort in 1997 to revamp the retail program and build a direct relationship with consumers, hiring Johnson from Target in 2000 to build the division. Media speculation at launch held that Apple would fail at retail; instead the stores bypassed the sales of competing nearby outlets and within three years reached $1 billion in annual sales, the fastest retailer in history to that mark. The stores sell, service, and repair Apple products, with the Genius Bar providing technical advice and same-day repairs as the signature service innovation. Apple has received design patents and architectural awards for the chain, notably its glass staircases and cubes, and rival consumer-electronics retailers lost traffic and margins to the format's perceived quality of service.

The commercial that introduced the Macintosh was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at the Chiat/Day agency, produced by Fairbanks Films in New York, and directed by Ridley Scott, on a budget reported between $370,000 and $900,000. A reference to George Orwell's 1949 novel of a dystopia ruled by a televised Big Brother, the sixty-second spot opens on rows of bald, grey-clad workers marching through a blue-gray tunnel of telescreens, intercut with a full-color athlete in red shorts and a white tank top bearing a Picasso-style drawing of the Macintosh, sprinting from four black-uniformed pursuers and hurling a brass-headed sledgehammer through the screen of Big Brother's rant. English athlete Anya Major played the heroine, and David Graham supplied Big Brother's voice. The ad closes by promising that the viewer will see why 1984 will not be like the novel's 1984 — Apple casting itself explicitly as the antidote to conformity.

Think different, Apple's advertising slogan from 1997 to 2002, was created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day and read widely as a riposte to IBM's Think. The campaign's birth was scrappy: in 1986 chief executive John Sculley had replaced Chiat/Day with BBDO, and in 1997, under Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched a brand campaign with the slogan We're back. Everyone in the room approved except the recently returned Jobs, who called the slogan stupid on the ground that Apple was not back yet. He then invited three agencies to present ideas reflecting the philosophy he wanted reinforced inside the company he had co-founded. Art director Craig Tanimoto coined the phrase, and Jobs insisted on different as a noun — think victory, think beauty, colloquial like think big — rejecting the grammatically safer think differently. The slogan was still printed on iMac packaging decades later.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook's usage surged and Zuckerberg predicted a permanent acceleration in online behavior that would outlast the virus. The company hired accordingly, expanding headcount from 48,268 in March 2020 to beyond 87,000 by September 2022. The forecast proved wrong: e-commerce demand normalized, advertising softened, and Meta's costs had been sized for a boom that ended. In early 2022 the company reported no growth in monthly users, warned that Apple's privacy changes would cost roughly ten billion dollars in annual advertising revenue, and watched its share price fall twenty-seven percent in a day, erasing about two hundred thirty billion dollars of market value, the largest single-company wipeout Wall Street had seen. Zuckerberg's own net worth fell by as much as thirty-one billion dollars in the rout, and he pointed to competition for attention, particularly from TikTok's short video, as the structural threat. Employment, which had passed eighty-seven thousand at the September 2022 peak, became the clearest physical measure of the reversal.

The iTunes Store grew out of Jobs's push to open a legitimate digital marketplace for music as file sharing gutted CD sales. In 2002 he struck an agreement with the five major record labels to offer their catalogs through iTunes — at launch the only legal digital music source carrying all five — and introduced the iTunes Music Store at a special Apple music event in April 2003, opening for business on April 28, 2003, for Mac users, with a Windows version following that October. The store's model, selling individual songs rather than albums at a flat price that settled around ninety-nine cents, rewired label economics and consumer expectations alike. By April 2008 the iTunes Store was the largest music vendor in the United States, and by February 2010 the largest in the world, with first-quarter 2011 revenues near $1.4 billion and 35 billion songs sold by May 2014, before streaming finally overtook downloads in 2016.

While developing the iPhone before its 2007 unveiling, Jobs did not intend to allow third-party native applications at all, directing outside developers to build web apps for the Safari browser instead. Developer backlash forced a reconsideration: in October 2007 Jobs announced that Apple would provide a software development kit by February 2008, and the SDK shipped March 6, 2008. Before the store opened, users could install third-party apps only by jailbreaking their phones, a thriving gray market that demonstrated demand Apple's founder had underestimated. The App Store opened July 10, 2008, with roughly 500 applications available, coinciding with the iPhone 3G's release a day later. In-app purchases arrived in 2009 and became the dominant monetization model, especially for games. Apple claims the App Store seeded the app economy and says it had paid developers over $320 billion by 2023, while the same record shows developers and regulators criticizing the thirty-percent commission as the excessive toll of a monopoly, including a 2021 Dutch finding that the commission structure was anti-competitive.

Apple's 1988 copyright suit against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard sought to block GUI elements resembling the Lisa and Macintosh systems, and its collapse cleared Windows' path. Apple argued that the look and feel of the Macintosh interface, taken as a whole, was protected, and it listed 189 interface elements it claimed were infringed; the court found that 179 of those had already been licensed to Microsoft in the Windows 1.0 agreement, and that most of the rest were either unoriginal to Apple or the only possible expression of an underlying idea. The district court set a standard of virtual identity for infringement, which the Ninth Circuit almost entirely affirmed in 1994, holding that the similarities sprang from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression, and the Supreme Court declined to hear Apple's appeal. Apple's only win covered the trash can and folder icons in Hewlett-Packard's NewWave; a parallel Xerox suit against Apple was dismissed.

Steven Paul Jobs, born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and raised by adoptive parents in what became Silicon Valley, built the defining founder arc of the personal computer age. With Steve Wozniak he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 to sell the Apple I, gained fame and wealth with the mass-produced Apple II, and pushed graphical computing into the mainstream with the 1984 Macintosh. The board removed him in 1985, and in exile he founded NeXT and bought the Lucasfilm graphics unit that became Pixar. Apple, near bankruptcy, acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded; as chief executive he revived it with the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, and by 2011 it stood among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in Palo Alto that October, at fifty-six.

The campaign's centerpiece, the sixty-second television spot known as Crazy Ones, ran black-and-white footage of seventeen twentieth-century figures, among them Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Ted Turner, Richard Branson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Maria Callas, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Henson and Kermit, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso, closing on a young girl opening her eyes as if making a wish. Jobs's connections secured likeness rights from figures who never did advertising: he personally telephoned the families of Jim Henson and John F. Kennedy and flew to New York to visit Yoko Ono. Two narrations were recorded, one by Jobs and one by actor Richard Dreyfuss; though Lee Clow argued it would be powerful for Jobs to voice the spot as a symbol of reclaiming the brand, Jobs chose the Dreyfuss version on the morning of the first air date, saying the campaign was about Apple, not about himself. His own narration was played at Apple's internal memorial for him in 2011.

Windows 1.0's commercial defense was legal as much as technical. Apple had agreed to license certain parts of its graphical interface to Microsoft for Windows 1.0, and Microsoft courted hardware makers, with Compaq, Zenith, and DEC supporting the environment while Microsoft encouraged even competitors to write Windows applications without adopting Microsoft's own interface conventions. The operating environment included multitasking, mouse support, and built-in programs such as Calculator, Paint, and Notepad, though its windows could not overlap. Windows 2.0, released December 9, 1987, added overlapping windows and other Macintosh-like features, which Apple treated as exceeding the 1985 license and answered with a copyright suit in 1988. Microsoft supported Windows 1.0 until December 31, 2001, making it the longest-supported version of Windows ever shipped, a quiet monument to how early Gates had placed the graphical bet. The company had begun selling the Microsoft Mouse in May 1983 to give the environment a pointing device.

Paid verification became the platform's identity and its most volatile product. Musk pushed the subscription after the takeover explicitly to offset declining advertising revenue, folding the blue checkmark into a $7.99 monthly Twitter Blue tier launched November 9, 2022. Impersonation disasters followed within days, with accounts posing as companies and public figures, forcing suspension of the feature on November 11 and a relaunch on December 12 at a higher price on iOS to absorb Apple's 30 percent cut. Legacy verification for public figures was slated for removal in March 2023 and executed that April, replaced by a base subscription, a $1,000-per-month verified-organizations tier with gold checks plus $50 per affiliate, and a requirement that advertisers join the verified program to buy ads on the platform. Musk also ordered the recommendation timeline to prioritize paid accounts, inverting verification from an authentication service into the primary subscription wedge.

Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, in a keynote at the Macworld Conference and Expo at Moscone West in San Francisco, telling the audience it was a day he had looked forward to for two and a half years and that Apple was going to reinvent the phone. He framed the product as three devices fused into one: an iPod with a widescreen touch interface, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Six weeks before release, after Jobs found his keys had scratched the plastic prototype in his pocket, the screen was switched to glass, with Corning supplying it and Foxconn winning the manufacturing bid. The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, at $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model with a two-year contract. Six of ten Americans surveyed knew of its release beforehand; thousands waited outside stores, and stock ran short within an hour.

The commercial's path to air was improvised. It first ran on December 31, 1983, in ten local outlets, including Twin Falls, Idaho, where Chiat/Day bought the last possible break before midnight on station KMVT so the spot would qualify for the 1984 Clio Awards. Its second and only national airing came on January 22, 1984, during the third quarter of CBS's Super Bowl XVIII telecast. Within Apple the ad had been a subject of contention — the board reportedly disliked it — but the single broadcast became a watershed event and, in the industry's judgment, a masterpiece. In 1995 the Clio Awards inducted it into their Hall of Fame, and Advertising Age placed it at the top of its list of the fifty greatest commercials ever made. Regis McKenna later judged the advertisement more successful than the Macintosh itself, an early lesson that Jobs's product launches were media events first.

Unveiled on October 23, 2001, after development in under a year, the first iPod was announced by Jobs as a Mac-compatible product with a five-gigabyte hard drive that put a thousand songs in your pocket. Priced at $399 and launched amid skepticism about a consumer-electronics pivot by a struggling computer maker, it sold more than 100,000 units before the end of 2001, and Fortune labeled it Apple's twenty-first-century Walkman. The device's real strategic weight emerged over the following half-decade: the iPod made Apple a major player in the music industry, set up the iTunes Music Store as the first mass-market legal download service, and trained tens of millions of customers to use Apple interfaces and buy Apple hardware in categories far from computers. Jobs later noted that Apple made little profit from song sales themselves — the store existed to sell iPods — a razor-and-blades inversion where the music subsidized the hardware, not the reverse.

In 1979 Xerox granted Apple access to its Palo Alto Research Center in exchange for the right to buy $1 million of Apple stock ahead of the IPO. Jobs and Apple colleagues visited PARC twice, in November and December 1979, and he was greatly impressed by the graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto, deciding on the spot to implement what he had seen in the Apple Lisa, the business machine under development since that July. Jobs led the Lisa effort from early 1980 until excessive technical demands disrupted it and he was removed from the project that September, which pushed him toward the Macintosh. Released in January 1983 at $9,995, the Lisa offered genuine innovation, windows and icons and a mouse, but its price and software isolation drove buyers away: more than $150 million went into development while only about 10,000 units sold, teaching Apple the cost lesson the Macintosh then had to solve.

By the mid-1990s Apple's distress was existential. In 1995 the chief financial officer asked directors to find a buyer, judging the company no longer able to support itself, and resigned when the board refused; Fortune wrote in February 1996 that the company which invented the personal computer would likely disappear, noting that $1,000 invested in Apple a decade earlier was worth $2,900 against $22,000 in Compaq. Apple came hours from acquisition by Sun Microsystems, refused an IBM offer it later sought again, and failed to ship a modern operating system after the Copland project collapsed into feature creep. Choosing between Be's BeOS and NeXT, Apple announced on December 20, 1996, that it would purchase NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system for roughly $429 million plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, bringing Jobs back into management for the first time since 1985 and giving the Mac its next technological foundation.

At the August 1997 Macworld Expo in Boston, Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft whose terms included a five-year commitment to keep releasing Microsoft Office for the Macintosh and a $150 million investment in Apple. The long-running patent dispute over whether Windows infringed Apple's interface rights was settled, and Internet Explorer would ship as the Mac's default browser. Jobs framed the deal for the audience as the end of an era of rivalry: for Apple to win, Apple had to do a really good job, and if others helped, so much the better. The money was largely symbolic — Apple's market capitalization stood at $2.46 billion the day before, with $1.7 billion in quarterly revenue and $1.2 billion in cash reserves — but the psychological effect was immediate, signaling that the returning founder would trade pride for survival, keep Office on the platform, and refocus the company on execution rather than litigation.

Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, evident in the magnesium case of the NeXTcube, and the strain on the hardware division told: after selling only 50,000 machines, NeXT withdrew from hardware entirely in 1993 and transitioned to software with the release of NeXTSTEP for Intel processors, refashioning itself as NeXT Software. The company reported its first annual profit, $1.03 million, in 1994, and in 1996 released WebObjects, an early enterprise framework for building web applications that Apple would later use to run the Apple Store, MobileMe, and the iTunes Store. In 1997 Apple acquired NeXT for $427 million, returning Jobs to the company as an advisor before his elevation to chief executive. NeXTSTEP became the basis for Rhapsody and Mac OS X, whose Darwin core now underlies macOS and iOS, making the failed workstation company the software DNA of every Apple device sold since.

The transition years between 2007 and 2008 supplied Netflix's foundational infrastructure stories. In February 2007 the company delivered its billionth DVD, a copy of Babel to a customer in Texas. In April 2007 it recruited ReplayTV founder Anthony Wood to build a Netflix Player that would bring streaming to televisions; Hastings eventually shut the project down to encourage other hardware manufacturers to build in Netflix support, and the effort was spun off as the digital media player company Roku. In January 2008 all rental-disc subscribers became entitled to unlimited streaming at no additional cost, a response to the introduction of Hulu and Apple's new video-rental services. In August 2008 the Netflix database was corrupted and the company could not ship DVDs for three days, leading it to move all its data to the Amazon Web Services cloud, a migration that became a textbook case study in cloud architecture and incidentally tied Netflix's fate to the infrastructure of its eventual competitor's parent.

While shutting down Apple's licensing of its operating system to clone manufacturers, one of Jobs's first moves as acting chief executive was to develop the iMac, which bought the company time to restructure. Introduced in 1998, the original iMac integrated the display and processor in a streamlined translucent plastic body and became a sales smash, moving roughly one million units each year. The machine reintroduced Apple to media and public and announced the company's new emphasis on design and aesthetics — its maker boasted that the back of their computer looked better than the front of anyone else's. It also made hard technical choices that rippled across the industry, dropping the floppy disk drive and standardizing on USB, which popularized USB among peripheral makers who began shipping translucent-plastic accessories to match. The iMac was the first proof, ahead of the iPod and iPhone, that Jobs's design-led product philosophy could be a mass-market financial engine rather than a niche taste.

In October 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, its first portable digital music player, launching as a five-gigabyte device capable of storing around a thousand songs. The financial effect was enormous. In the quarter ending March 26, 2005, Apple earned $290 million on sales of $3.24 billion, against $46 million on $1.91 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, and Jobs told developers in June 2005 that Apple's share of the entire portable music device market stood at 76 percent. The player used a 1.8-inch hard drive where rivals used 2.5-inch units, enabling the small size that defined it, and it sold for $399 with more than 100,000 units gone before the end of 2001. The iPod converted Apple from a computer maker into a consumer-electronics company, set up the iTunes Store, trained the market for the iPhone, and funded the research that followed.

In May 2001 Apple announced its own retail stores, designed for two purposes: to stem its declining share of the computer market and to answer the poor presentation of Apple products at third-party outlets. On January 9, 2007, the company shortened its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., Jobs telling the Macworld Expo audience that with the iPod, Apple TV, and the Mac, Apple was no longer just a computer company; the same keynote revealed the iPhone, combining a widescreen iPod, visual voicemail, and an internet communicator running a full browser. The iPhone went on sale June 29, 2007. The iPad was announced January 27, 2010, reaching stores that April, and rather than cannibalizing Mac sales produced a halo effect that lifted iMac and MacBook demand. On May 26, 2010, Apple's stock market value overtook Microsoft's; that quarter its revenues passed Microsoft's too, the first such reversal in two decades.

By March 1976 Wozniak had finished the basic design of the Apple I and showed it to Jobs, who proposed they sell it despite Wozniak's initial skepticism. On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak, and administrative overseer Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company as a partnership in the Crist Drive house, the operation starting in Jobs's bedroom and moving to the garage; Wayne exited within days, leaving the two Steves as the active co-founders. The name came from Jobs's stay at the All One Farm commune in Oregon. To fund the first boards, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van. The plan was fifty-dollar bare circuit boards for hobbyists until retailer Paul Terrell ordered fifty fully assembled units at $500 each; roughly 200 Apple I computers were ultimately produced, enough to convert a garage project into a company with revenue and a roadmap.

Apple's first outside money came from Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer, who also brought the company to investor Arthur Rock; after seeing the crowded Apple booth at the Homebrew Computer Show, Rock started with a $60,000 investment and joined the board. Markkula next recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as Apple's first president and chief executive in February 1977, a decision Jobs openly disliked, an early lesson that professional managers rather than founders were running the corporate show. The pattern repeated across Jobs's career: he recruited or inherited successive chief executives, from Scott through Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio, before taking the title himself in 1997 and holding it until weeks before his death. The Markkula-Scott phase professionalized bookkeeping, inventory, and channel strategy while the founders kept product control, the division of authority whose collapse later produced the 1985 rupture.

Jobs and Wozniak took the wraps off the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, the first consumer product sold by Apple and one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers in the world. Wozniak designed the machine; Jobs oversaw its unusual case, and Rod Holt engineered its novel power supply. During development the two fought over expansion slots, Jobs wanting two for simplicity and Wozniak eight for flexibility, nearly splitting before settling on eight, an argument that previewed their lifelong disagreement about whether elegance or openness should win. The Apple II carried the company through its first growth decade, built the personal computer market for schools, small businesses, and homes, and made Jobs wealthy young: he was worth over $1 million at twenty-three and an estimated $250 million at twenty-five, among the youngest self-made names ever to reach the Forbes list of the nation's richest people.

In 1983 Jobs recruited John Sculley, president of Pepsi-Cola, to become Apple's chief executive with the famous pitch contrasting a career spent selling sugared water with a chance to change the world. The hire was meant to give the founder operational cover while he focused on the Macintosh; instead it created a rival power center with board backing. Their visions diverged sharply: Sculley favored open-architecture machines like the Apple II aimed at education, small business, and home markets less exposed to IBM, while Jobs wanted the closed-architecture Macintosh positioned as the business alternative to the IBM PC. The two divisions operated like separate companies, duplicating services, and the January 1985 annual meeting failed even to mention the Apple II group still providing 85 percent of sales, an omission that helped push Wozniak to leave amicably, sell most of his stock, and complain the company had been heading wrong for five years.

Jobs took over the Macintosh project in 1981 from Jef Raskin, who had conceived it, exploiting Wozniak's leave after a plane crash to seize control of the program. On January 22, 1984, Apple aired the Ridley Scott-directed commercial titled 1984 during the Super Bowl, and two days later an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh at the Flint Auditorium shareholders meeting to what engineer Andy Hertzfeld described as pandemonium, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface and mouse, priced at $2,495 and bundled with MacWrite and MacPaint. Initial acclaim and strong early sales collapsed in the second half of 1984 on low performance and a thin software library. The machine's redemption came in 1985 through desktop publishing: paired with the LaserWriter, the first laser printer with vector PostScript graphics, and Aldus PageMaker, the Macintosh launched an entire industry and kept Apple the second-largest personal computer maker into the 1990s.

By early 1985 the Macintosh's failure to dent the IBM PC had strengthened Sculley's hand. In May, encouraged by director Arthur Rock, Sculley proposed reorganizing Apple to strip Jobs of the Macintosh group and park him over new-product development, a role that would have rendered the founder decorative. Jobs answered with a plan of his own to oust Sculley, but the scheme leaked; confronted, Jobs said he would leave, and the board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider, while Sculley made clear he held the votes. On September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted his letter of resignation to the board, and five senior Apple employees resigned with him to join his next venture. The ouster became the hinge of his biography: twelve years in exile, then a return with the operating system, the design taste, and the scar tissue that would save Apple.

Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded, and after the board ousted Gil Amelio as chief executive on July 9, 1997, Jobs became de facto leader, formally interim chief executive on September 16. He moved fast: in March 1998 he terminated the Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc projects to concentrate resources on returning to profitability, and employees joked darkly about sharing an elevator with him in case the doors opened without their jobs, his summary executions being rare but a handful sufficing to terrorize a company. He rewrote the Macintosh clone licensing program to make it prohibitively costly, ending the clonemakers' free ride on the Mac OS. Much of NeXT's technology, most importantly NeXTSTEP, was folded into what became Mac OS X. At Macworld in January 2000 he dropped the interim label and quipped about serving as iCEO, the pun marking a permanent restoration.

Jobs's design aesthetic drew on the Zen Buddhism he studied in India and under Kobun Chino Otogawa, and on his stated ambition, echoing Edwin Land, to stand where humanities meet sciences. Wozniak insisted Jobs never coded and did no original engineering; early employee Daniel Kottke likewise cast Wozniak as the innovator and Jobs as the marketing mind. Yet Jobs is named as inventor or co-inventor on 346 United States patents and applications spanning devices, touch interfaces, keyboards, adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, and packaging, with roughly 200 shared with design chief Jonathan Ive, and his contributions concentrated on the look and feel of products rather than utility-patent engineering. Even hospitalized and terminally ill he sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed and redrew an oxygen monitor for simplicity. Since his death he has been granted 141 further patents, bringing his total beyond 450.

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, and in mid-2004 he told employees he had a tumor in his pancreas — a rare, less aggressive islet-cell neuroendocrine type, distinct from the usually fatal form of the disease. Biographer Walter Isaacson reported that Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for nine months, trying a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and treatments found online, before undergoing a Whipple procedure in July 2004 that appeared to remove the tumor; he received no chemotherapy or radiation, and Tim Cook ran the company meanwhile. Speculation mounted as his keynotes turned gaunt, and in August 2008 Bloomberg briefly published a prepared obituary with blanks for age and cause of death, which Jobs answered by paraphrasing Mark Twain on exaggerated reports of his death, then closed another presentation with a slide reading 110/70, his blood pressure. In January 2009 he took a six-month leave; Cook, who shared his rare blood type, offered a portion of his own liver and was refused. Jobs underwent a liver transplant in Memphis that April, with a prognosis described as excellent.

On January 17, 2011, Apple announced another medical leave so Jobs could focus on his health, with Cook again running day-to-day operations while Jobs stayed involved in major strategic decisions. He still appeared at the iPad 2 launch on March 2, presented iCloud at the developers' conference on June 6, and pitched Apple's proposed new campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7. On August 24, 2011, he resigned as chief executive, writing to the board that if there ever came a day when he could no longer meet his duties and expectations, he would be the first to let them know, and that unfortunately that day had come. He became chairman and named Cook his successor, and worked for Apple until the day before his death. He died at home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, of respiratory arrest from a relapse of the tumor, his sister Mona Simpson reporting that his final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables repeated three times. Flags flew at half-staff at Apple and Microsoft; California declared October 16 Steve Jobs Day.

Jobs kept his giving private and thin. Shortly after leaving Apple in 1985 he formed the Steven P. Jobs Foundation to focus on nutrition and vegetarianism, but closed it within the year as NeXT absorbed him; on returning to Apple in 1997 he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs, which were never restored, and Stanford Social Innovation Review later listed Apple among America's least philanthropic companies. He declined to sign the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010. He gave $50 million to Stanford's hospital, and Bono credited Apple-driven efforts with tens of millions of dollars for AIDS and HIV relief in Africa that inspired other companies to join. His honors tell the public story: the National Medal of Technology in 1985, awarded jointly with Wozniak by President Reagan; Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Decade in 1989; Fortune's most powerful person in business in 2007; and, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden in 2022 and induction as a Disney Legend in 2013.

Observers on both sides described Jobs's power of persuasion as a reality distortion field, on fullest display in the keynote addresses nicknamed Stevenotes at Macworld Expos and developer conferences. He wore a daily uniform of an Issey Miyake black mock turtleneck, Levi's 501 jeans, and New Balance sneakers, telling biographer Walter Isaacson he liked the daily convenience and the signature style of a personal uniform. He closed his January 2007 Macworld keynote by quoting hockey star Wayne Gretzky's line about skating to where the puck is going to be rather than where it has been, and applied it to Apple's whole history. His long public feud with Michael Dell ran from a 1987 jab about un-innovative beige boxes through Dell's 1997 advice to shut Apple down and return money to shareholders; when Apple's market value passed Dell's in 2006, Jobs emailed staff a short, gleeful note that Dell had proven imperfect at predicting the future.

Tim Cook opened the December 2023 quarter review by reporting revenue of $119.6 billion, up two percent year over year, and an all-time revenue record for the Services franchise. Management told the call that iPhone revenue had set a December-quarter record of approximately $69.7 billion on the strength of the iPhone 15 launch and that the installed base across all product categories had reached a new all-time high, with each geographic segment setting a new record. CFO Luca Maestri walked analysts through the gross-margin expansion to approximately forty-six percent, attributing roughly 130 basis points of the year-over-year gain to the services mix shift and the balance to favourable commodity and freight costs. He flagged that the Company had returned nearly $27 billion to shareholders during the quarter and that the board had authorized an additional $90 billion share repurchase program, signalling that the long-stated net-cash-neutral goal remained the framing for capital allocation. On the Q&A, an analyst asked Cook whether generative artificial intelligence would change Apple's competitive position in smartphones. Cook responded that Apple had been working on AI across products for years, that the on-device neural engine shipped in hundreds of millions of devices was a structural advantage and that the Company would continue to deploy AI responsibly with privacy as a differentiator. He also highlighted the imminent launch of Apple Vision Pro as a generational category creation rather than a single-product launch. The call closed with a forward revenue guide for the March quarter of approximately $90 billion, signalling a return to year-over-year revenue growth, and with management reiterating the commitment to invest aggressively in research and development while continuing to return essentially all of the operating free cash flow to shareholders.

The strategic self-interest was unusually explicit. Meta's business is building the best experiences, Zuckerberg wrote, so it must always have access to the best technology and never be locked into a competitor's closed ecosystem. He cited a formative experience: building services constrained by what Apple allows on its platforms, with the way it taxes developers, applies arbitrary rules, and blocks product innovations. Since Meta does not sell access to AI models, open-sourcing Llama does not undercut its revenue the way it would for closed providers, one reason, he noted, that closed providers lobby governments against open source. Precedent also mattered: Meta saved billions open-sourcing its server, network, and data center designs through the Open Compute Project, and it benefited from the ecosystems around its open tools PyTorch and React, whose communities returned improvements Meta could never have engineered alone. Openness, consistently held, had compounded before.

Tim Cook opened the September 2018 quarter review by reporting annual revenue of $265.6 billion and the highest full-year gross margin in Apple's history. Management highlighted that services revenue had crossed $37 billion for the year and was tracking toward the announced 2016 goal of doubling its 2016 size by 2020, and that the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud and the AppleCare warranty franchise were each individually the size of a Fortune 150 company on a stand-alone basis. CFO Luca Maestri walked analysts through the gross-margin expansion to approximately thirty-eight percent for the year, attributing it to the services mix and to favourable commodity costs. He flagged that the capital-return program had reached nearly $240 billion cumulatively since 2012, that the Company had completed the $210 billion share-repurchase authorization and that the board had authorized a new $100 billion buyback program in the prior quarter. On the Q&A, an analyst pressed on whether the Company was approaching the limit of meaningful share repurchases given the cash position. Maestri argued that the goal of reaching net-cash-neutral remained the guiding framework and that the buyback authorization was set on a multi-year horizon, not on a single-year basis. Cook added that the Company's investment in the services franchise should be read as the next leg of the integration moat, with the App Store, Apple Pay, Apple Music and iCloud each reinforcing the value of being inside the Apple ecosystem rather than migrating between platforms. The call closed with a forward revenue guide of approximately $89 to $93 billion for the December quarter, signalling continued iPhone strength, and with management declining to disclose unit shipments going forward, citing the irrelevance of unit volumes relative to the value of the installed base and the ecosystem's monetisation.

Buffett described Apple as a business whose economic characteristics — enormous consumer attachment, high margins on hardware that locked in a services ecosystem, and the capacity to return capital through buybacks — made it attractive even though Berkshire owned only a minority stake. He framed the holding in terms of look-through earnings: Apple's retained earnings, though not distributable to Berkshire, increased Berkshire's share of Apple's future cash flows each year Apple repurchased stock below intrinsic value.

On the logic of the Apple holding and look-through earnings.

CEO Tim Cook opened the September 2016 quarter review by reporting annual revenue of $217 billion and the highest services revenue in Apple's history. Management told the call that the iPhone 7 launch had driven a stronger-than-expected upgrade response in mature markets, and that the App Store had produced record billings during a quarter in which foreign-exchange pressure and macroeconomic softness in Greater China continued to weigh on the reported revenue line. CFO Luca Maestri walked analysts through the gross-margin trajectory, with the September quarter finishing at approximately thirty-eight percent, and flagged that commodity costs, foreign-exchange and a lower-priced iPhone SE were the principal margin headwinds in the near term. He also disclosed that Apple had returned more than $21 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends during the fiscal year, in line with the capital-return program announced in 2012 and expanded several times since. On the Q&A, an analyst asked whether the Company viewed services as the next iPhone in terms of scale and margins. Cook argued that the services business was growing on the back of an installed base that had reached an all-time high, that the App Store's gross margin profile was structurally above the Company average and that the services growth trajectory was the most direct read on customer satisfaction across the Apple ecosystem. He also defended the iPhone SE strategy as essential to bringing first-time smartphone buyers into the iOS ecosystem in emerging markets. The call closed with management declining to provide forward unit guidance, instead framing the next-quarter revenue guide of between $76 and $78 billion around the strength of the iPhone 7 family and the continuing services momentum, and reiterating the Company's intent to become net-cash-neutral over time.

In his October 2013 open letter to Apple's chief executive, Icahn argued that the company's shares traded far below intrinsic value and that a very large tender-financed share repurchase — he suggested on the order of 150 billion dollars — would be accretive for remaining shareholders without endangering the balance sheet. His framing was classic Icahn: he praised the business effusively while insisting its board was misallocating capital by leaving the repurchase too small.

Icahn wrote that he intended to keep buying Apple stock himself, which he did, and positioned his proposal as friendly rather than hostile: no board seats demanded, just a bigger buyback. Analysts at the time noted the letter moved the stock within minutes of publication — an early demonstration of how a public activist letter on social media could move a mega-cap.

The campaign ended with Apple accelerating its repurchase program in 2014 and Icahn declaring victory and moving on, though he later sold his stake in 2016 citing China risk for the iPhone business. The episode became a template study in modern activism: concentrated capital, an economic argument stated in plain language, and public pressure applied without a proxy fight.

Apple's September 2007 quarter was the first reported period after the iPhone launch, and Steve Jobs opened the call by reporting that more than 1.1 million iPhones had shipped in the product's first full quarter on the market. Management also reported Macintosh unit growth of more than thirty percent year over year and the highest quarterly revenue in Apple's history, anchored on the strength of the redesigned iMac, strong iPod international growth and an explosive contribution from the iTunes Store. CFO Peter Oppenheimer walked analysts through the gross-margin expansion to above thirty-four percent, attributing roughly half of the year-over-year gain to commodity cost declines and the balance to favourable product mix. He flagged that the Company was now generating close to $24 billion in trailing-twelve-month revenue and had built a cash position of more than $15 billion with zero debt. On the Q&A, an analyst asked Jobs whether Apple was prepared to lower the iPhone's price to drive penetration faster in international markets. Jobs defended the early price cut taken on the original iPhone, arguing that the iPhone had to earn its place in the smartphone category through experience rather than compete on price, and that the carrier-revenue-share model would evolve over time. He also pushed back on the suggestion that Apple should license Mac OS X, framing that as a strategy that would compromise the integration of hardware and software that was Apple's central advantage. The call closed with management providing a forward quarterly revenue guide of approximately $9.2 billion, which would have been Apple's largest quarter to date, and reiterating that the Company would continue to invest in retail, marketing and product development rather than return cash to shareholders.

CEO Steve Jobs opened the December 2002 quarter review by reporting that Apple had returned to profitability on the back of the iPod's breakthrough, with CPU shipments up forty percent year over year. Management told the call that the Company had shipped 649,000 iPods in the quarter, more than twice the prior-year quarter, and that the iTunes music store strategy was being designed to drive a multi-year switch in how consumers acquired music rather than to be a standalone revenue line. CFO Fred Anderson walked analysts through the gross-margin recovery, which had expanded more than 700 basis points year over year on the mix shift toward higher-margin consumer products. He flagged that the Company's channel inventory had been brought down to roughly four weeks, a level Apple had not achieved in years, and that operating expenses had been held flat in absolute dollar terms despite the launch of the Apple retail store program. On the Q&A, analysts pressed on whether the iPod could carry Apple's growth beyond the existing Macintosh installed base. Jobs argued that the iPod was the first product that allowed Apple to win over Windows users who had never considered a Mac, and that the strategic value was the door the product opened into the broader digital lifestyle rather than the standalone unit economics of the device itself. He also signalled that the Company would continue to invest aggressively in the retail store rollout despite the near-term operating expense drag. The call closed with management declining to provide forward quarterly revenue guidance beyond directional commentary, citing the volatility of consumer demand and the early stage of the iPod's international rollout.