Apple turns 40 years old today, and what a journey it’s been: from a promising homebrew startup to an underdog fighting off bankruptcy to an industry-straddling behemoth with $233.7 billion in revenue.
It’s impossible to boil down every significant Apple event into one story, but we did our best to pick out the 40 most significant moments in the company’s past.
Check out these key moments in Apple history below.
Apple Inc. and General Electric are two of the most iconic American companies of the last century, but back in 1996 they almost become one company as GE CEO Jack Welch considered buying the computer maker.
It would have only cost GE $2 billion and the current Apple CEO, Michael Spindler, was begging Welch to pull the trigger on the deal in order to save the struggling company.
Phil Schiller says Apple is too busy “inventing the future” to “celebrate the past” by building a museum.
So if you are in search of history on the 40th anniversary of Apple’s founding, you might want to travel to Georgia. There, a guy named Lonnie Mimms has taken over an old CompUSA building and meticulously crafted a tangible timeline that would make Apple’s futurists — perhaps even Schiller — pause with nostalgia and pride.
Apple hasn’t done enough to publicly present its side of the current privacy standoff with the FBI, concerning whether or not it should build an iPhone backdoor, claims Andrea “Andy” Cunningham, Steve Jobs’ former publicist.
“I think [Steve] would’ve spent more time framing the issue for the [public] than I think [Apple under Tim Cook has] done so far,” Cunningham says.
In some sad news, Andy Grove, a.k.a. one of the founders and former CEOs of Intel, passed away yesterday at the age of 79.
The Budapest-born Grove was a mentor to many people in Silicon Valley, including Steve Jobs, who once noted that he was one of the only people Jobs would willingly work for. Grove famously arrived in the United States with less than $20 and rose to turn Intel from a startup into one of the world’s largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers.
In a Twitter tribute, Tim Cook wrote that Grove, “was one of the giants of the technology world. He loved our country and epitomized America at its best.”
Steve Jobs was such a perfectionist that, for years, he didn’t fill his house with furniture simply because he couldn’t find items that measured up to his high standards.
Which is why it is oddly fitting that only now — approaching five years after the former Apple CEO’s death — is work finally set to begin on building Steve Jobs’ dream family house on land he bought way back in 1984.
If you’ve long dreamed of seeing the epic tech rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates staged as a Broadway musical, written by two of the writers from Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken (and who hasn’t?), well, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a bit longer.
That’s because the somewhat unflatteringly-titled Nerds has seen its Broadway opening — originally scheduled for April — cancelled after one of the sources of funding pulled out of the project.
Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs movie bombed hard at the box office and failed to win anything at the Oscars, but the MTV Movie Awards are apparently a bit kinder than the Academy and the movie-going public. The Jobs semi-biopic just got nominated for the movie awards show’s Best True Story prize.
Kind of ironic, given Steve Jobs’ myriad inaccuracies, don’t you think?
The oddball collection of Steve Jobs-inspired musicals is set to gain another entry this month, as new “original pop-rock musical” The Crazy Ones makes it debut at 54 Below — the supper club beneath the legendary Studio 54 — in New York City.
Taking its name from a line in Apple’s iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, the musical tells the story of a young Steve Jobs being driven out of Apple — although the wording on its press release makes it sound oddly like the trailer for a 1980s horror movie.
Going into a big job interview can be an incredibly nerve-wracking experience, but when Steve Jobs is doing the questioning, the tension ramps up to an all-new level.
The Apple co-founder was notoriously difficult to work for, thanks to his intense demands. Being interviewed by Steve for a job was even worse, because as one former Pixar employee explains, the Apple CEO pretty much wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.
San Francisco has a check with Steve Jobs’ name on it.
It’s for a piddling amount — a $174 refund for overpaid parking tickets — and Jobs’ estate has only until March 3 to claim it.
Bringing its award season to a shuddering halt, Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic had a disappointing night Sunday at the Oscars — with its two nominations failing to turn into wins.
It’s the Oscars this weekend, and if you’re an Apple fan, one question that lingers in the mind is what exactly happened to all the early awards buzz for Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic.
Initially hailed as one of 2015’s crowning cinematic achievements, the movie bombed at the box office and even registered on some “worst movies of the year” lists. Although it has picked up Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Supporting Actress (Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet), the movie failed to get put forward for Best Picture, while Sorkin was also a notable absence in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
Having now seen Steve Jobs three times (twice at the theater and once on Blu-ray), here are my thoughts on why the flick was ultimately a disappointment.
Everyone associates the Mac’s creation with Steve Jobs (with very good reason), but there is another person without whom we wouldn’t have Apple’s iconic home computers: user interface guru Jef Raskin, who passed away on February 26, 2005 — exactly 11 years ago today.
Raskin not only named the Macintosh — after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh (even though that spelling was already being used by an audio company) — he also gave the lovable computer some of its lasting personality traits.
Steve Jobs had a way of getting under people’s skin. Still does, if you consider the growing number of Apple fans who have had his iconic face or some other Jobs tribute tattooed onto their skin.
Today we celebrate what would have been the Apple co-founder’s 61st birthday by looking at body art inspired by the pioneer of personal computing.
According to Tim Cook, Apple is working alongside Steve Jobs’ family to come up with an idea for the “right way” to pay tribute to him with Apple’s upcoming “spaceship campus.”
In an interview with Fortune, Cook confirmed that, “We will definitely honor [Steve] in the right kind of way,” with the new campus — whose opening has reportedly been delayed from 2016 until early 2017.
An odd assortment of purported artefacts from Steve Jobs’s wilderness years – including a pair of his rated running sandals – were sold at auction today. And while it’s not entirely clear who bought them, all of the disparate items, dating back to Steve Jobs’s NeXT years, still ended up earning a pretty penny.
John Sculley may be best known to a generation of Apple fans as the CEO who made the company choose between him and Steve Jobs. But he’s also a successful investor, mentor and entrepreneur — as well as the person who increased Apple’s sales from $800 million to $8 billion during his decade at the top.
In an interview with Cult of Mac, Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, tells why he doesn’t wear an Apple Watch, makes the case that AAPL stock is undervalued, explains how the Steve Jobs movie twisted facts, and talks about his new book Moonshot and the future of entrepreneurism.
If you didn’t catch Steve Jobs in theaters (and, based on the box office, chances are you didn’t!) Universal Pictures Home Entertainment today released the movie on Blu-ray and DVD.
Extras for the controversial, somewhat divisive film include an “Inside Jobs: The Making of Steve Jobs” bonus feature, and audio commentaries from director Danny Boyle, writer Aaron Sorkin and editor Elliot Graham.
And, hey, if you don’t feel like shelling out for it, you can always enter our free giveaway here.
Kate Winslet picked up another award win for her role as Apple PR guru Johanna Hoffman at last night’s BAFTA British movie award show.
Winslet’s win was the only prize won by Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs semi-biopic, which was also nominated for “Best Adapted Screenplay” and “Best Actor” gongs for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and lead actor Michael Fassbender, but lost out to The Big Short and Leo in The Revenant.
Maybe moviegoing audiences didn’t completely fall in love with director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, but we liked it a lot. And if you also enjoyed it — or are just looking to score yourself a free copy — keep reading.
Only a handful of products Steve Jobs introduced to the world became flops, but three years after he was kicked out of Apple, the tech visionary unveiled his biggest failure ever: the NeXT computer.
Video footage of Jobs’ first major public appearance since he left Apple in 1985 was lost to the world until researchers for Aaron Sorkin’s movie came across two videotapes of the NeXT’s gala unveiling at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall in 1988.
Bill Gates has a song in his heart for the late Steve Jobs. Yes, they were fierce rivals as they pioneered products that revolutionized personal computing, but the competition mellowed into a good friendship.
So when Gates, in an interview on BBC show Desert Island Discs, was asked to choose eight songs and why they are meaningful to him, he had one picked out for Jobs — “Two of Us” by The Beatles.
Apple is officially moving into San Jose.
The company received unanimous approval from the San Jose city council this week to develop on property it has leased in North San Jose for the next 15 years. The council approved Apple to build up to 4.15 million square feet of space, but what Apple plans to do with it is still a mystery.
Apple’s senior director of real estate development, Kristina Raspe, told the city council that the company still doesn’t have any firm plans on how the space will be used.
These days, Apple is known for its impeccable design sensibilities. Less than 20 years ago, though, that wasn’t the case. Case in point? These awesomely retro, fluorescently hideous in-store demos made to help sell the Macintosh in 1997.
