Apple marked 50 years since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the company on April 1, 1976, a start that began with two partners and quickly ran into the kind of instability that can sink a young hardware company. The early story, as documented by The Associated Press, framed Apple’s origin as an improbable mix of a “scrawny hippie” and a “nerdy engineer” who set out to change the world—and then had to survive setbacks that included a volatile breakup with Jobs and multiple leadership shakeups.
Jobs, 21 at the time, and Wozniak, 25, signed the two-page partnership document on April 1, 1976, creating Apple Computer Co. Jobs and Wozniak each held 45% of the company, while their 41-year-old adviser, Ron Wayne, received 10%, according to the AP account. The company’s early attempt to build a personal computer took place in Los Altos, California, at the home of Jobs’ parents, and it tested the willingness of early backers to stay involved.
The AP timeline describes how Ron Wayne stepped away from the company as it tried to get its early computer work off the ground. Wayne relinquished his stake for $2,300, an exit the AP story says later proved costly when compared with how much Apple is now valued. The anniversary coverage also emphasizes how close Apple came to collapse even as the company later became synonymous with consumer technology.
Apple’s early breakthrough arrived with the release of the Apple II computer in June 1977, following the company’s 1976 founding. The AP report says the Apple II carried a price of $1,298 at launch (equivalent to about $7,000 now, adjusted for inflation), and that Apple’s sales momentum helped lead it to an initial public offering in late 1980 at $22 per share.
The AP account also points to Apple’s high-profile launch of the Macintosh in 1984 as a cultural moment as well as a product milestone. It says Jobs read the opening lines of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” at Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on Jan. 24, 1984, when Apple unveiled the first Macintosh, which introduced the mouse and a graphical interface. Two days earlier, Apple teased the Macintosh with a 60-second commercial directed by Ridley Scott that evoked George Orwell’s “1984,” and the AP story credits the ad with helping make Super Bowl commercials into an art form and part of American cultural “zeitgeist.”
But the AP report says the Macintosh rollout did not deliver the commercial lift Apple expected. It says the Macintosh cost $2,500 (nearly $7,900 today, adjusted for inflation), contributing to the sales shortfall that led Apple to cut costs and lay off workers under CEO John Sculley, a former PepsiCo executive Jobs had recruited in 1983. As the relationship between Jobs and Sculley broke down into a power struggle, the AP timeline says Apple’s board sided with Sculley, leading Jobs to resign in September 1985 after what the AP story characterizes as a deep sense of betrayal.
After Jobs left, Apple continued producing Mac versions with Sculley in charge, but the AP report describes a long-running legal fight over graphics and interface copying by Microsoft. It says the dispute triggered a seven-year battle that ended with a 1994 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting Apple’s copyright claims, and notes that the pressure continued internally: Apple fired Sculley in mid-1993 and replaced him with Michael Spindler, who was ousted in early 1996 as losses mounted.
The AP account then traces Apple’s next attempt at stabilization under Gil Amelio, whom Apple picked from its own board. It says Amelio engineered a turnaround at National Semiconductor before joining Apple, but that most of his moves did not work except for one: a $428 million deal for the operating system from NeXT, the computer startup Jobs launched after leaving Apple. With that acquisition in hand, the AP narrative sets up the company’s eventual path back to Jobs himself.
The anniversary story describes how Apple fired Amelio in July 1997, setting the stage for Jobs’ return. The AP account says Jobs had initially planned to serve only briefly as an adviser, and it describes Apple’s July 1997 decision as the turning point that allowed Jobs to orchestrate a turnaround. By August 1997, the AP story says Jobs had made peace with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and reached a deal that included a $150 million cash infusion from Microsoft, money the AP report says helped enable Jobs to introduce the iMac line.
The AP timeline credits the iMac launch with a new era of consumer-focused design, describing the candy-colored, translucent computers that carried an “i” prefix meant to reflect a five-point creed of “internet, individual, instruct, inform, and inspire.” From there, the AP report follows the product arc outward: it says Jobs introduced the first iPod in October 2001, noting that the device initially could hold up to 1,000 songs and that Apple sold 450 million iPods in different designs, which the AP story says helped hasten the decline of the CD format and set the stage for music streaming.
The AP account reaches its centerpiece with the iPhone reveal on Jan. 9, 2007. It says Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and presented the “breakthroughs” as an iPod with touch-screen controls, a cellphone and an internet communicator, then delivered a pivot: “These are not three separate devices. This is one device! And we are calling it the iPhone.” The AP report says Apple has sold more than 3 billion iPhones since then, and that the iPhone still accounts for more than half of Apple’s annual revenue of $416 billion, nearly 15 years after Jobs died of cancer.
Finally, the AP story links Apple’s continued reliance on the iPhone to leadership after Jobs. It says Apple’s ongoing dependence on the iPhone stems in part from the company’s inability to create another “mesmerizing” product under Jobs’ hand-picked successor, Tim Cook. Still, the anniversary coverage concludes by framing Apple’s overall market value as proof of the long-term effect of the comeback: it says Apple is worth 10 times more than its $350 billion market value at the time Jobs died.