Apple was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (with Ronald Wayne, who sold his share within weeks). Wozniak's Apple II, released in 1977, was one of the first personal computers ordinary people could buy, switch on and use — no soldering required.
The Macintosh and the graphical interface
In 1984 the Macintosh brought the mouse, windows and icons — ideas pioneered at Xerox PARC and Douglas Engelbart's lab — to a machine aimed at everyone. It was a commercial gamble that reset expectations for what using a computer should feel like, and it established Apple's lasting obsession with the marriage of hardware and software.
Near-death and the second act
By the mid-1990s Apple was close to bankruptcy. Jobs returned in 1997, cut the product line to a handful of things done well, and staged one of the most famous turnarounds in business history: the iMac, then the iPod (2001), then the iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010).
The integrated model
Apple's defining strategy is vertical integration — designing the chips, the hardware, the operating system and the services to work as one. The iPhone in particular reshaped whole industries and, for a time, made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Its approach — control the whole stack, treat design as seriously as engineering — remains one of the two great templates in consumer technology, the counterpoint to the open, licence-everything model of the PC era.