![]() How do you follow the world’s most popular computer? With an abject failure, of course. The Apple II, the real brainchild of Woz, was the product that launched the company, and made the majority of Apple’s revenue throughout the 1980s despite its fancy focus on the sexier Macintosh. Apple IIįollowing on from the primitive Apple I Apple produced what was to become one of the most successful personal computers ever. There was also once talk of “applets”, but thankfully this never really caught on. Some people probably think Apple invented them, too. (Source: ‘Apple Confidential 2.0’, Linzmayer) AppĮxactly like an “application” but cuter sounding and much easier to squeeze puns from. If it had waited till 1999 when AOL’s stock peaked those same shares would have been worth … wait for it … $24.5 billion. Apple sold the shares in 1996 at a profit of $39m. As part of the deal it acquired 2m shares of AOL stock at a cost of $12.5m – 5 percent of the company. Long before Time Warner and the Internet boom Apple replaced its unwanted AppleLink online service with a joint venture with a company called Quantum, then rebranded America Online. ![]() Jobs wasted little time turfing out the garrulous Amelio (who he had slamed as a “bozo”) and taking back his company – and for that we should be eternally grateful. In scrapping the next-generation Copland operating system Amelio did his best work bringing back Steve Jobs via Apple’s acquisition of his NeXT OS in 1996 – which turned out to be the business world’s most successful takeover but also the most expensive career suicide. Receiving $100,000 for use of his private jet while on Apple business wasn’t the best start in Amelio’s austerity measures – nor was his $1m salary or nice little $5m loan he procured from the ailing giant.īut Amelio did cut costs, slashing the Apple workforce by a third. But for over a dozen dark years Steve was absent from the company he founded and lesser men stood in his place.Īt its lowest point Apple’s board of directors appointed the cost-cutting CEO of National Semiconductor Gil Amelio as the company’s new boss in order to return Apple to profitability. When you think of Apple leaders you probably recall the visionary legend that is Steve Jobs or his cuddly ewok-like co-founder Woz. It makes up about 8 percent by weight of the Earth’s solid surface, and about the same on the average active Mac’s screen. There’s plenty of it, too – aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, and the third most abundant element after oxygen and silicon. Once a great ally of Apple and partner pioneer in desktop publishing’s marriage of PostScript and Apple’s Mac and LaserWriter Adobe fell from grace when the once-faithful design software partner apparently abandoned Apple at its lowest moment. As Michael Malone writes in his Apple history ‘Infinite Loop’ the Apple name was “smart, funny, anti-establishment, unforgettable, friendly but hip.” It wasn’t just a name “it was the culmination of the Age of Aquarius”. Whatever the story Apple was a great name for the new startup, and the antithesis of the old guard of Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, etc. Our computer would be friendly-everything an apple represents, healthy, personal, in the home. We took the attitude that Apple is a good name. We had to have a name that suggested technology, number crunching, calculations, databases. The ad agency kept telling us the name had to be changed. You do that when you’re on a hobby basis. It came from the days when you picked an interesting, fun name for a company. Woz has said that “to a marketer Apple was an odd name. Macworld has gathered more on why Apple is called Apple.
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