25 Things You Might Not Know About Apple
by Nicholas Kolakowski
- Steve Jobs attributed a childhood fascination with “Heathkits,” hobbyist kits that let you assemble electronic equipment by hand, as first giving him “self-confidence” in building products.
- Back in 1977, a high-end Apple II system with 48 kilobytes of RAM, a 6-kilobyte BASIC interpreter, and a case and keyboard cost $2,778. Moore’s Law at work.
- Contrast the Apple II’s cost and specs with a high-end Apple PC today: A 27-inch iMac with a 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM and a 2TB Serial ATA hard drive costs $3,937 via the Apple Store.
- “The Macintosh will die in another few years and it’s really sad,” Jobs told an interviewer in 1995, during his exile at NeXT. “The problem is this: No one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh.”
- Apple’s retail stores number some 284 worldwide.
- Apple’s original logo featured more than just fruit: There was also Isaac Newton, reading under a tree.
- “Rock and Roll will never die. It is, however, being reborn.” That 2003 slogan helped Apple sell the concept of iTunes, with its 99-cent songs and $9.99 albums.
- The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a Power Mac G4 Cube as part of its collection.
- Before the name “iPad” was announced for Apple’s tablet PC, rumors circulated that it could be named “iSlate” or “iTablet.”
- In 2006, Pixar was sold to Disney for $7.4 billion. Jobs had originally purchased the animation studio from George Lucas for $5 million, plus invested another $5 million in the company.
- Before the iPad or the iPod Touch, there was the Apple Newton, a PDA that died messily in 1998 after nine years of development.
- Microsoft made a $150 million investment in a struggling Apple in 1997. “We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Steve Jobs told the audience during the announcement.
- Apple reached its 1 billionth application downloaded from the App Store on April 23, 2009.
- Some of the most-downloaded free applications from the App Store have included Facebook for iPhone and Google Earth. Bestselling paid apps have included Koi Pond and Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D.
- “Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford in 2005.
- Apple dropped “Apple Computer” from its name to become just “Apple Inc.” in 2007, signaling the company’s shift into mobile and other non-PC areas.
- Apple’s initial expectations for the iPhone was that it would take a 1 percent global market share by the end of 2008. According to Gartner, iPhone global market share in Q4 2008 was 10.7 percent.
- In a bid to be environmentally friendly, Macs include PVC-free power cords and mercury-free LED-backlit displays. The iPhone “ships free of BFRs, PVC, arsenic and mercury,” according to the company.
- Apple’s board of directors reportedly hated the now-iconic “1984” ad for the Macintosh that aired-just once-during the 1984 Super Bowl.
- Research firm IDC has predicted that the App Store will contain some 300,000 apps by the end of 2010.
- Apple entered the Fortune 500 at 411 in 1983.
- Officially, the Apple Lisa (which debuted in 1983) stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture (“Lisa”). One common assumption, or even misconception, was that the computer was named after Jobs’ first daughter.
- Apple designed a custom processor for the iPad, the 1GHz Apple A4.
- Apple designer Jonathan Ive and his team once visited a candy factory to figure out how to mass-produce consistent colors for the iMac.
- The original Macintosh Portable weighed more than 16 pounds. Compare that to Apple’s laptops today, such as the MacBook Air, which weighs 3 pounds.
