Apple Inc.
Consumer electronicsFounded 1976- Updated June 2026
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: June 2026
CorpDigest
Apple Inc.
Company History
Founded 1976 in Cupertino, California
Last reviewed: 2026-06-03 · By Swet Parvadiya
Apple Inc. Was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in Cupertino, California. A Los Altos garage, April 1976. Ronald Wayne drafted the original partnership agreement, taking a 10% stake that he sold back for $800. The Apple II, launched in 1977 with a proper case, keyboard, and color display, became the first mass-market personal computer and made both founders wealthy before either turned 25.
He cancelled dozens of product lines, reduced Apple's SKU count from hundreds to single digits, and launched the iMac, iPod, and eventually the iPhone — the product that generated more revenue in a single quarter than Apple's entire pre-Jobs annual output.
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 and became the company's defining product strategist. His contribution was turning Wozniak's technical achievement into a commercial story: a personal computer that could be sold to real customers, not only hobbyists. Jobs pushed Apple toward integrated design, strong branding, and tight control over the user experience. After being forced out in 1985, he founded NeXT and helped build Pixar before returning to Apple through the 1997 NeXT acquisition. His second era produced the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, restoring Apple from near-collapse to global influence. Jobs's lasting influence is the belief that hardware, software, design, and business model should be managed as one product experience.
Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple and supplied the engineering foundation for its early success. He designed the Apple I as a working personal-computer board and then created the Apple II, the product that transformed Apple into a real company. Wozniak's style was different from Jobs's: he valued openness, technical elegance, and the joy of building useful machines. After a 1981 plane crash and later changes in Apple's direction, he stepped back from day-to-day influence, though he remained permanently associated with the company's founding identity. His lasting contribution is the proof that technical simplicity can be a strategic advantage. Apple's later obsession with performance, efficiency, and integrated design still traces back to Wozniak's engineering discipline.
Ronald Wayne co-founded Apple in 1976 but exited the partnership after only days, selling his stake back to Jobs and Wozniak. His departure has become famous because that stake would later have been worth an enormous amount, but the decision made sense from his perspective at the time. Wayne had personal financial obligations and did not want unlimited liability if the young company failed to pay suppliers. Although he did not shape Apple's product strategy, his early paperwork and logo work helped formalize the company at the start. Wayne's story remains a reminder that Apple's founding was not inevitable mythology. It was a risky small business before it became Silicon Valley legend.
Apple acquired NeXT to obtain a modern operating-system foundation and bring Steve Jobs back into the company. NeXTSTEP technology became a foundation for future Apple software platforms.
Apple acquired Siri to add voice-assistant technology to iPhone and broaden the ways users could interact with devices. The technology later became integrated across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, HomePod, and CarPlay.
Apple acquired Beats Electronics to strengthen music streaming, premium audio hardware, and cultural relevance in music. The deal gave Apple talent, a subscription-music foothold, and a consumer audio brand that could sit beside AirPods and Apple Music.
Apple acquired Shazam to strengthen music discovery and deepen engagement with Apple Music. The app's recognition technology fit naturally into iOS, Siri, and music recommendations.
Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy in August 1997 with $1 billion in losses, 4% PC market share, and a confusing product line of 15+ Macintosh models when Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO. Jobs immediately cut the product line to four models (consumer/pro, desktop/laptop), negotiated a $150 million investment from Microsoft (settling patent disputes), and killed the Newton PDA and licensing program that were bleeding cash. Most importantly, Jobs refocused Apple on premium products for creative professionals rather than competing with Dell on price, laying groundwork for the 1998 iMac that sold 2 million units and returned Apple to profitability after 12 consecutive quarterly losses.
Apple's board forced Steve Jobs out in 1985 after conflicts with CEO John Sculley (whom Jobs had recruited from Pepsi), and the company slowly declined over 12 years through failed CEOs, loss of differentiation against Windows PCs, and inability to modernize the Mac operating system. Apple's market share fell from 16% in 1985 to 4% by 1997, and the company lost $1.86 billion in 1996-1997 as consumers saw little reason to pay Apple's 40% price premium for computers that couldn't run popular Windows software. The crisis peaked in 1997 when CEO Gil Amelio was ousted after just 17 months, and Apple acquired NeXT Computer for $429 million, bringing Steve Jobs back and providing the Unix-based foundation for Mac OS X.
Apple launched the iPhone on June 29, 2007 at $499-599, selling 1.4 million units in the first quarter and creating an entirely new $11 billion revenue stream by 2009 that would eventually dwarf the Mac business. The iPhone combined an iPod, phone, and internet communicator with a revolutionary multi-touch interface, and Steve Jobs negotiated unprecedented revenue-sharing with AT&T (30% of monthly service fees) that no other phone maker had achieved. By 2012, iPhone represented 58% of Apple's $156 billion revenue, generating $80 billion annually versus the Mac's $24 billion, and the device's 40%+ gross margins made Apple the most profitable technology company in history with $41 billion in net income.
Apple surpassed ExxonMobil as the world's most valuable company by market capitalization in August 2011, reaching $337 billion valuation driven by iPhone's dominance (capturing 50%+ of global smartphone industry profits despite 15% market share). The milestone reflected Apple's transformation from near-bankruptcy in 1997 ($2.5B market cap) to a technology giant generating $108 billion in annual revenue and $26 billion in profits by 2011. Apple briefly ceded the title to ExxonMobil and other companies during market fluctuations but permanently established itself as the most valuable company from 2012 onward, reaching $3.5 trillion market cap by 2024—larger than the entire stock markets of most countries.
Apple introduced the iPod on October 23, 2001, less than six weeks after the September 11 attacks, with a 5 GB hard-drive-based player priced at $399 and the famous '1,000 songs in your pocket' tagline. Steve Jobs had returned as CEO in 1997 with Apple holding a 2.8% PC market share and posting a $1.04 billion fiscal 1997 loss; the iPod was the first non-Macintosh hardware product of his second tenure, designed under hardware vice president Jon Rubinstein and chief designer Jony Ive with software led by Tony Fadell. Initial sales were modest at roughly 125,000 units in calendar 2001, but with the launch of iTunes for Windows in October 2003 and the iTunes Music Store in April 2003, iPod unit sales accelerated to 4.4 million in fiscal 2004, 22.5 million in fiscal 2005, and a peak of 54.8 million in fiscal 2008. By 2007, iPod and iTunes generated nearly half of Apple's revenue and lifted the company's market capitalization above $100 billion for the first time. More importantly, the iPod proved Apple could design, manufacture, and market consumer electronics outside the Mac, establish a hit retail experience through the new Apple Stores opened in May 2001, and integrate hardware with services through iTunes. Those capabilities became the template for the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, the Watch in 2015, and AirPods in 2016, making the 2001 iPod the pivot point from troubled PC maker to global consumer-electronics giant.