Apple Inc. Case Study

On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak began the partnership that would eventually become Apple Computer in Cupertino, California. “Apple Computer, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company’s best-known hardware products are the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Its software includes the Mac OS X operating system; the iTunes media browser; the iLife suite of multimedia and creativity software; the iWork suite of productivity software; Aperture, a professional photography package; Final Cut Studio, a suite of professional audio and film-industry software products; Logic Studio, a suite of music production tools, the Safari web browser; and iOS, a mobile operating system” (Wikipedia). Some of Apple’s competitors include IBM, Dell, and HP.

The first computer, the Apple I, was hand-built by Stephen Wozniak in the garage of Steve Jobs’s parents. It was known as the “kit computer” the original Apple consisted merely of a circuit board and did not even have an exterior casing. The Apple I did not sell well and this lead to the introduction of the Apple II on April 16, 1977. This helped increase the Apple’s annual sales to $10 million and the company quickly began to grow in size. Apple became a public company on December 12, 1980. In 1983, Steve Job’s recruited Pepsi-Cola CEO John Sculley as Apple’s president and CEO. But after a few years, Jobs and Sculley began to disagree over the direction of the company and this lead to Jobs leaving the company to start his own new business. In 1990, one of Apple’s competitors Microsoft released Windows 3.0, the first universal software that could run on nearly every PC regardless of the manufacturer. This hurt Apple’s world-wide sales even though they tried to partner with other companies like IBM and Motorola to produce the PowerPC chip which would run the company’s new line of Power Macs allowing it to outperform computers powered by Intel microprocessors (Hitt, Ireland, Hoskisson, 2011).

Jobs returned to Apple in December 1996 and proceeded to change the company’s sales strategy in 1997 to encompass direct sales both online and by phone. The iPod a portable digital audio player was announced in October 2001 but started selling in November. In 2002, Apple introduced iLife a software suite including applications such as iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, and eventually the iPod. ITunes was the first legal online music store, which allowed consumers to not only download and purchase single songs but also entire albums. With the introduction of iTunes, consumers were allowed to buy music on iTunes and connect it to their iPods. “In first quarter 2007, Apple launched its revolutionary product the “iPhone”. It combined three concepts popular with consumers: a mobile device, a wide screen iPod, and an Internet communication