Apple was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who sold his stake back for $800 twelve days later. Wozniak designed the Apple I and then the Apple II, which shipped in 1977 with color graphics, expansion slots and a case ordinary buyers were willing to put on a desk. That product, not the founding story, made Apple a business: it carried the company into schools and small offices and funded the December 1980 initial public offering.
The Macintosh, the ouster and the near miss
The Macintosh arrived in January 1984 at $2,495 and brought a graphical interface and a mouse to a mass-market machine. It defined how Apple products would look and feel, but the price and a thin software catalogue limited its reach while cheaper IBM-compatible PCs set the industry standard. Jobs clashed with chief executive John Sculley and left in 1985. Apple sales still grew to about $8 billion under Sculley, then the 1990s went badly: too many models, a stalled operating system project, and licensing deals that let clone makers undercut Apple's own hardware. By 1997 the company was close enough to failing that buying Jobs' startup NeXT for $429 million, and taking a $150 million investment from Microsoft, counted as survival measures.
From the iMac to the App Store
Jobs cut the product line to a small grid of consumer and professional desktops and portables, ended clone licensing, and shipped the iMac in 1998. The iPod followed in 2001 and the iTunes Store in 2003, which gave Apple a paid media business and, for the first time, a large number of Windows users walking into Apple stores. Retail itself started in 2001 and is now more than 500 stores. The iPhone, introduced in January 2007, combined a phone, an iPod and an internet client, and the App Store that opened in 2008 with 500 apps turned the device into a platform other companies built on. That single decision created both the services business and the antitrust exposure Apple still carries.
Tim Cook: services, silicon and scale
Tim Cook became chief executive on August 24, 2011, the day Jobs resigned. His fifteen years were about operating leverage rather than invention: supplier discipline, new categories in Apple Watch, AirPods and Vision Pro, custom silicon that moved Macs off Intel from 2020, and a services layer sold into the installed base. The financial record is specific. Apple says market capitalization grew from about $350 billion to $4 trillion during his tenure and annual revenue nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2025 itself set the pattern for how the company now earns money: net sales of $416.2 billion, up 6 percent, and net income of $112.0 billion, with iPhone at $209.6 billion and Services at $109.2 billion. Services carried a 75.4 percent gross margin against 36.8 percent on hardware, which is why a segment that is 26 percent of revenue matters more than that to profit. Operations produced $111.5 billion of cash, research and development took $34.6 billion, and $89.3 billion went to buybacks with another $15.4 billion in dividends.
What the App Store fights have already changed
The commission structure that funds much of Services is being rewritten from outside. In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act forced alternative app stores, alternative payment processing and browser choice, with fines of up to 10 percent of worldwide net sales for noncompliance. In the United States, a California court found on April 30, 2025 that Apple had violated the 2021 Epic Games injunction, barred it from charging any commission on purchases made outside an app, and referred the company for review of possible criminal contempt; Apple's appeal was argued in the Ninth Circuit in October 2025. The Justice Department's own case, filed on March 21, 2024 in New Jersey with a group of state attorneys general, attacks the wider pattern: App Store rules, messaging interoperability, watch integration and access for third-party devices. A separate risk runs through Google, which court filings showed paid Apple about $20 billion in 2022 for default search placement in Safari, an arrangement now shaped by remedies a Washington court ordered in September 2025.
The handover to John Ternus
Apple announced on April 20, 2026 that Cook would become executive chairman and that John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering, would become chief executive effective September 1, 2026. Ternus joined the board on that date, and Arthur Levinson moved from non-executive chairman to lead independent director. Ternus inherits three open problems and one advantage. The problems are AI, where the rebuilt Siri shipped only as a beta with iOS 27 in September 2026 and was withheld from the EU at launch; China, where net sales fell from $72.6 billion in fiscal 2023 to $64.4 billion in fiscal 2025 as Huawei recovered; and regulation, which now sets rules Apple used to write itself. The advantage is the installed base, which Apple puts above 2.5 billion active devices, plus supply chain optionality: Bloomberg reported in March 2026 that about a quarter of iPhones, roughly 55 million units in 2025, are now assembled in India. The market has been willing to pay for that position, briefly valuing Apple at $5 trillion on July 28, 2026.
