May 19, 1980: Apple introduces the Apple III at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim, California.
After two years of development, the Apple III arrives to follow the enormously successful Apple II. For a variety of reasons, it turns out to be the company’s first major misstep.
April 29, 1997: Steve Jobs’ friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, calls off his bid to take over Apple.
Ellison’s plan is to reinstall Jobs, who is then just an adviser to Apple CEO Gil Amelio, as the company’s chief executive. He also wants to take Apple private again.
January 9, 2001: Steve Jobs introduces customers to iTunes at Macworld.
In a world before the iPod or the iTunes Store, iTunes is simply described by Apple as, “the world’s best and easiest to use jukebox software that lets users create and manage their own music library on their Mac.” Even the biggest Apple fanboy can’t imagine just how significant a step this will be for Apple.
December 13, 1994: Apple strikes a deal with Bandai, Japan’s largest toymaker, to license Mac technology for the creation of a new videogame console.
Based on the PowerPC 603 CPU and running a stripped-down, CD-ROM-based version of Mac OS, Apple calls the resulting game machine the “Pippin.” Unfortunately, it becomes a total sales disaster.
April 3, 1995: Apple introduces the Macintosh LC 580, an affordable computer offering good multimedia capabilities on a budget.
It quickly proves popular in the educational market. If you used a Mac in the classroom in the mid-1990s, there’s a good chance it was this very model!
August 25, 2016: An ultra-rare Apple-1 computer raises $815,000 in a charity auction, one of the highest prices ever paid for one of the machines. Bidding actually reaches $1.2 million in the auction’s final minutes. However, that bid gets pulled seconds before a winner is announced.
The reason for the super-high price? This “Celebration” Apple-1 boasts a feature that did not appear on any production models of the computer.
June 30, 2011: A little more than a year after the iPad goes on sale, the number of iPad-exclusive apps in the App Store passes 100,000.
The milestone caps a brilliant first year for Apple’s long-awaited tablet. And the amazing breadth of iPad-only apps proves the device is much more than just a bigger iPhone.
February 19, 1981: Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh project, sends a memo to Apple CEO Mike Scott, listing his many complaints about working with Steve Jobs.
He claims that Jobs, who joined the Mac team the previous month, is tardy, shows bad judgment, interrupts people, doesn’t listen and is a bad manager.
October 23, 1999: Apple releases Mac OS 9, the last version of the classic Mac operating system before the company will make the leap to OS X a couple years later.
It does not veer far from OS 8 in terms of look and feel. However, OS 9 adds a few nifty features that make it well worth the upgrade.
September 18, 1989: Steve Jobs’ company NeXT Inc. ships version 1.0 of NeXTStep, its object-oriented, multitasking operating system.
Incredibly advanced for its time, NeXTStep is described by The New York Times as “Macintosh on steroids.” In an ironic twist, the operating system Jobs plans to use to compete with Cupertino turns out to be one of the things that saves Apple a decade later.
September 15, 1988: Apple releases the Apple IIc Plus, the sixth and final model in the Apple II computer series. It’s a great machine, with impressive capabilities, but suffers from poor marketing and support.
With the Mac around, Cupertino simply doesn’t seem interested in the Apple computer anymore.
August 27, 2008: The U.K. bans an iPhone ad for apparently misleading consumers.
The misleading bit? The ad overhypes the iPhone’s internet-surfing abilities. It does this by not mentioning that the device doesn’t support Adobe Flash — which is vital to internet surfing in 2008. How times change, eh?
August 20, 2012: Apple breaks records as it becomes the most valuable public company in human history.
When markets close, Apple’s market cap — the stock price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares — sits at an astonishing $623.5 billion. This beats the previous record of $618.9 billion set by Microsoft on December 30, 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble.
The iPhone packed a lot into its first astonishing decade. Not only has the device itself evolved significantly since its promising-but-by-no-means-perfect beginnings, but it’s transformed Apple’s business — and many of our very lives — in the process.
All this week, Cult of Mac’s “iPhone Turns 10” series will look at the innovative device’s massive impact on worldwide culture. The iPhone, which launched on June 29, 2007, truly changed the world.
What iPhone milestones have passed since Steve Jobs introduced this stunning hybrid device, which combined a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device? Check out our handy guide to 10 years of iPhone history.
June 8, 2009: Apple promotes its 13-inch MacBook to join the MacBook Pro family, adding a speed bump, new FireWire 800 port, the first SD card slot on a MacBook, improved LED-backlit screen, and backlit keyboard across all models.
Coming the year after Apple radically upgraded its MacBooks with a new aluminum unibody design, the update is more about evolution than revolution. But it still makes for a pretty darn great laptop!
September 19, 1988: Apple debuts the Macintosh IIx, an incremental upgrade of its fantastic Macintosh II.
The updated model is the first Mac to come with Apple’s new, improved 1.44MB floppy disk SuperDrive. It also packs a hefty price tag of between $7,769 and $9,300 — the equivalent of $15,817 to $18,934 today.
So don’t even try complaining about the cost of an iMac, circa 2016!
September 14, 2005: Apple embraces exclusive music releases by debuting a digital EP from Coldplay on iTunes, featuring four previously-unheard tracks from the enormously popular band.
100 percent of profits from the charity EP go to support victims of Hurricane Katrina. However, Apple’s ability to broker exclusive music deals with major record labels and popular artists shows that the company’s current exclusives-driven Apple Music strategy stretches back more than a decade.
September 6, 2007: Apple deals with its first iPhone PR crisis, when early adopters complain about the company dropping the price of its new smartphone by $200 just two months after introducing it.
In response, Steve Jobs offers affected customers $100 credit which can be used toward the purchase of any Apple store product. “Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these,” he writes.
September 1, 2010: Apple announces its fourth-generation iPod touch, a version of the portable music player which closes the gap between the iPod touch and the iPhone.
Along with being thinner than ever, the fourth-gen iPod touch’s main innovations include a redesigned form factor, Retina display, FaceTime calling via WiFi, HD video recording, and the same A4 chip found in the iPhone at the time.
August 23, 2002: Apple ships Mac OS X Jaguar, the third major release of OS X and the first to publicly adopt the cat-themed code name it had been known by inside the company.
The $129 operating system is well-received by Mac users, who correctly view it as the most stable version of OS X yet — and with a few neat features, to boot.
August 17, 1944: Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder and former CEO of Oracle, and Steve Jobs’ best friend, is born.
A later member of the Apple board of directors and the closest thing Jobs had to a confidante, in the 1990s Ellison even considered staging a hostile takeover of Apple to reinstall Jobs as CEO during his time away from the company.
Jobs’ son, Reed, reportedly referred to Ellison as, “our rich friend.”
August 16, 2013: JOBS, the Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher, lands in theaters.
The first of two competing Jobs movies (the second one was the Aaron Sorkin version, based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography), the movie receives polarizing reviews from critics, but fails to make an impact at the box office — where it earns just $6.7 million in its first weekend.
August 10, 2004: The iTunes Music Store catalog grows to 1 million songs in the United States, a first for an online music service.
Stocking music from all five major record labels and another 600 indies, and with more than 100 millions songs downloaded, the iTunes Music Store is officially established as the world’s No. 1 online music service.
August 9, 1995: Netscape Communications, the company behind the Macintosh’s then-web browser Netscape Navigator, floats on the stock market.
While not totally an Apple-centric moment, this was big news for Mac fans in 1995 — and the experience of using Netscape Navigator to surf the internet on a Macintosh is something many older Apple users will still remember fondly.
August 4, 2010: Apple fires the first shot in its apparently never-ending war against Samsung, when a team of Apple executives visit Samsung’s HQ in Seoul, South Korea, and give a presentation with the title, “Samsung’s Use of Apple Patents in Smartphones.”
It marks the official start of a multi-billion dollar battle between the two rivals (and, weirdly, collaborators) which has continued to rage ever since.
