Apple Computer was established in 1976 by Ronald Wayne, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs.
After only two weeks, Wayne left the company and sold his 10% stock for $800. If he'd kept those
10% to this day, it would be worth over $60 billion. A few months after Wayne's departure, Apple
released the Apple 1. Steve Wozniak developed and designed both the hardware and operating
system. In fact, the Apple 1 was the first time in history that a character displayed
on a TV screen was generated by a home computer. Only a year later, Wozniak developed the Apple II.
The first PC with color. In 1984, Apple launched the first Macintosh. In 1985 something
interesting happened. A power struggle developed between Jobs and then CEO John Sculley. As
a result of this, Apple's board of directors removed Jobs from his management duties which
in turn lead to his resignation from the company the same year. After Jobs left, Apple would
struggle financially for many years to come. Meanwhile, Jobs founded a new company called
NeXT. NeXT released a couple of PCs but most importantly developed software like NeXTStep
and OPENStep. These would later on serve as the building blocks for Mac OS X. Because
of NeXT's continued growth and Apple's continued financial failures, Apple actually purchased
NeXT in 1996. And as part of the agreement, Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Once he was
back at Apple, Jobs began restructuring the company's product line and products like the
iMac G3, Mac OS X, iTunes, and most importantly the iPod where all released. The iPod was
a mayor success, which in turn lead to the company changing its name from Apple Computer, Inc.
to simply Apple Inc. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone and has since become the most valuable
brand in the world.
Almost every advertisement and all promotional material for Apple's products has the time
set to 9:41 AM. This is because on the 9th of January, 2007 at 9:41 AM
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public.
Nowadays it's easy to take things for granted. Especially technology. We use things every
day without really thinking about it. For example, when was the last time you thought
about the origin of rounded rectangles? In 1981, Apple employee Bill Atkinson came up
with a new algorithm to draw ovals and circles on the Macintosh. But Steve Jobs wasn't impressed,
he wanted something more. He wanted rectangles with rounded corners. Bill said it would be
almost impossible and impractical, but Jobs insisted. So the very next day, Bill came
up with a new algorithm that could draw rectangles with rounded corners just as fast as regular
rectangles. He simply called them RoundRects. But even though Apple wasn't the first to
use this sort of primitive, they are certainly responsible for its use in more or less every
user interface ever since.
Apple fans can be a little extreme at times. Don't get me wrong, I like that sweet taste
of as good Apple every now and then but I mean, there's a lot of other fruit out there.
Why limit yourself to a tiny Apple when you can have like a melon! Right? I mean seriously,
you can't say no to a melon. Just look at that thing! That.. waow!
Is anyone else getting weirdly turned on by this?
Fans of Apple the company, can be a little extreme. A Japanese
blogger so badly wanted to have the first iPhone 6 that he started waiting outside an
Apple store 7 months before the iPhone 6 was expected to be released. I say expected because,
at the time, the iPhone 6 hadn't even been announced yet. But he gave up pretty quickly
and didn't actually sit there for the entire 7 months.
Have you ever read through an entire end user license agreement?
That's a rhetorical question and if you said yes, you're fucking lying.
There's nothing in this world we agree to
faster than this wall of text. But if you where to read the EULA for iTunes, which I
absolutely did not do. At the very end, you'll find this clause.
"You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including,
without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of...
nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons." Ehm.. I.. I'm not.. I'm not entirely sure how that..
Like.. How that goes along with iTunes? But, yeah. It's there! In case, you know..
In case you should want to spend the weekend creating biological weapons with your friends and stuff,
you know.. Like that kind of stuff. It happens. We've all been there!
When Apple first started releasing laptops, the logo on the back was always up side down.
Or right side up, depending on how you look at it. It was found that when a laptop had
the logo facing away from the user when closed (like it is nowadays) people would attempt
to open the laptop from the wrong side. But somewhere along the line they realized that
most people aren't actually that dumb so the logo was reversed.
With the release of the AppStore in 2008, mobile gaming has become a pretty huge hit
to say the least. Still if you're a gamer, Apple products usually aren't your first choice.
No offense to any apple fans watching this but it's quite uncommon to see the Apple logo
on new game releases. However, once upon a time Apple actually made a video game console.
It was called the Apple Pippin and was released in 1995 in Japan and the US. It was supposed
to compete with Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and the Nintendo 64. There's was only one
slight problem, it failed miserably. It had a price tag of $599 and only sold around 42,000
copies. But the biggest issue was that the US version only had 18 games.
There's a lot of rumors about the Apple Logo and why the company is named Apple. For example,
a popular misconception is that the logo is a representation of the forbidden fruit mentioned
in the bible. The truth however, is far more unexceptional. Both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
has said that the name Apple was randomly chosen because of its simplicity and as they
couldn't come up with a better name. At the time, personal computers where not that common
so they wanted a name that was easy to understand and not intimidating to the average person.
The logo was also chosen because of its simplicity. At the very beginning though, they actually
used a logo featuring Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. But this was changed
because it would be unrecognizable in small print. When they changed the logo to the current
design they considered using a logo with or without the bite, but in the end the logo
with the bite was chosen to make smaller versions indistinguishable from a cherry.
Everything you say to Siri is recorded, sent to Apple, analyzed, and then stored for 2 years.
And don't act surprised, it's all there in that wall of text you absolutely read before
clicking accept, right? I mean you did that, right? No but seriously, in this day and age,
when privacy is becoming more and more a thing of the past, it's sadly not that much of a
surprise anymore. So next time you talk to your you phone, know that it's someone's job
to sit and listen to everything you say.
In 1987, Apple released a series of videos titled Knowledge Navigator.
Let's take a quick look.
It's a pretty amazing coincidence that exactly 20 years later apple would unveil
the iPhone with more or less the same touch technology shown in the video. But that's
not why I showed you this. Let's look at it again. It's quite hard to see but the calender
in the video says September 16th. Then he asks the personal assistant for a research
paper from 5 years ago.
Which turns out to be from 2006. That means, the video is set
to take place in September 2011. Now here's the thing. Siri, Apple's actual personal assistant
was released in October 2011. Only a month after the date they predicted.