Who Founded Apple?

Apple Computer was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, who sold his 10% stake back to his partners for $800 twelve days later. Two college dropouts built circuit boards in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. The engineering came from Wozniak, who designed the Apple I and then the Apple II, a machine with color graphics and an integrated keyboard that made the personal computer accessible to people outside the hobbyist world. Jobs supplied the commercial drive and the conviction that computers should be designed for ordinary users rather than for corporations, a view that produced the Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-market computer sold with a graphical interface and a mouse. His management style brought him into conflict with then-CEO John Sculley, and he was pushed out of Apple in 1985. The second chapter matters as much as the first. Without Jobs the product line lost focus and the company came close to failing in the late 1990s, so Apple bought his company NeXT in 1997 and he returned as chief executive. He cut the product lineup, took a $150 million investment from Microsoft, and worked closely with designer Jony Ive on the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, the sequence that turned Apple into the most valuable company in the industry.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955 in San Francisco. Education: Homestead High School; De Anza College.

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.

Steve Wozniak was born in 1950 in San Jose. Education: University of California, Berkeley; De Anza College; Homestead High School.

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 a large 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.

Ronald Wayne was born in 1934 in Cleveland. Education: High School of Art and Design.