Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayneon April 1, 1976, to develop and sell personal computers.It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977, and was renamed as Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007, to reflect its shifted focus towards consumer electronics. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average on March 19, 2015.

Apple is the world's second-largest information technology company by revenue after Samsung Electronics, world's largest technology company by Total Assets and the world's third-largest mobile phone maker. On November 25, 2014, in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over $700 billion.^[ As of 2014, Apple employs 72,800 permanent full-time employees, maintains 437 retail stores in fifteen countries,and operates the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the world's largest music retailer.

Apple's worldwide annual revenue in 2014 totaled US$182 billion (FYend October 2014). Apple enjoys a high level of brand loyalty and, according to the 2014 edition of the Interbrand Best Global Brands report, is the world's most valuable brand with a valuation of $118.9 billion. By the end of 2014, the corporation continued to manage significant criticism regarding the labor practices of its contractors, as well as for its environmental and business practices, including the origins of source materials.

History:

Apple was incorporated January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple. During the first five years of operations, revenues doubled every four months, an average growth rate of 700%.

The Apple II, also invented by Wozniak, was introduced on April 16, 1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because of its character cell-based color graphics and open architecture. While early Apple II models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface called the Disk II.The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world: VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II: compatibility with the office.^[26] Before VisiCalc, Apple had been a distant third place competitor to Commodore and Tandy

By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The company introduced the Apple III in May 1980 in an attempt to compete with IBM and Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market. Jobs and several Apple employees, including Jef Raskin, visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares (800,000 split-adjusted shares) of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.

Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface (GUI), and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa. In 1982, however, he was pushed from the Lisa team due to infighting. Jobs took over Jef Raskin's low-cost-computer project, the Macintosh. A race broke out between the Lisa team and the Macintosh team over which product would ship first. Lisa won the race in 1983 and became the first personal computer sold to the public with a GUI, but was a commercial failure due to its high price tag and limited software titles.

On December 12, 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share, generating more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly creating more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history.