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At 40, There's Never Been a Tech Company Quite Like Apple (qz.com) 106

Posted by msmash from the hate-it-or-love-it-but-can't-ignore-it dept.
Mike Murphy, reporting for Quartz: Forty years ago today, two college dropouts decided to start selling cobbled-together computers out of a garage in California because they couldn't afford the ones on the market. They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units. But in the years between then and now, Apple has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, spurring revolutions in how we communicate, use computers, listen to music, and to a lesser extent, tell the time. [...] Some critics think that Apple is boring now, setting itself up to iterate on its successes and lock customers into their services with products that are very good, but nothing they haven't really seen before. This is a solid business strategy that will provide strong returns for years to come, but not those eye-popping leaps we've seen before. Here's a video Apple published recently showcasing 40 of its most remarkable products.
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At 40, There's Never Been a Tech Company Quite Like Apple More

At 40, There's Never Been a Tech Company Quite Like Apple

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  • Apple is boring? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Noah Haders ( 3621429 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @02:52PM (#51825029)

    Boring? Just wait for the apple car. It will blow you away.

    • "This is our thinnest, fastest, most easy-to-use care yet!"

      I am sure that Apple will claim that they invented the rounded, aerodynamic corners on cars as well...

      • Will apple change a 30% any toll usages will ther (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:03PM (#51825083)

        Will apple change a 30% fee for any toll usages will there cars on top of the tolls?

        • That you got a Score 5 Interesting is most-interesting to me. I'm still having difficulty parsing the last part of your sentence: "...on top of the tolls?"

          Will apple change a 30% fee for any toll usages will there cars on top of the tolls?

    • We are not responsible for

      Any injuries

      Any Death

      Any Damages

      Any court costs

      Any jail / prison time for the owner of the car due to an accident or death.

      Any tickets or fines

      Any non apple service

      Any non apple changing cable

      Any non apple tries

      Any data roaming or overage fees from any pushed / updated / downloaded software.

    • How will I connect it to iTunes??

    • Just wait for the apple car. It will blow you away.

      Because it's so thin and light?

    • I might consider an Apple car if it plays nicely with my Android phone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Boring? Just wait for the Apple car. It will blow you away.

      iPinto?
       

    • "You're driving it wrong."

    • Apple car with only one button. You don't get into it, it wraps around you. It doesn't drive you anywhere, it just changes your perception of what is around you so you don't want to go anywhere else.

      Also maybe it won't blow you away but just blow you.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by neoRUR ( 674398 )
      Actually there is already a prototype. https://www.pinterest.com/lear... [pinterest.com]

      • you should consider this fact: one out of every 20 americans bought a new car last year. What does that tell you? americans like buying shiny new cars. and what could be shinier and newer than the iCar? Probably nothing. The iCar will get really high MPGs and lots of KWs. I htink it's going to be electrified. Maybe when they are done they can drive it from San Francisco to New York City on a publicity tour. My first impression is that they are working on it in secret and calling it Project Titan. How cool w

        • one out of every 20 americans bought a new car last year. What does that tell you? americans like buying shiny new cars.

          That tells me an entirely different thing. It tells me people are replacing their cars every 20 years, or buying used much more often. As people typically buy a new car every 3 years on average, that tells me that far more people buy used cars.

          • about 15m new car sales per year. 40m used car sales per year. consider your statistic, first when you say "new" car it is likely new to them but not brand new. Also, a family may have 1 or 2 cars but 4 or 5 people. so if you think about it my figure is pretty accurate.

  • college dropouts? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OffTheLip ( 636691 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @02:54PM (#51825037)
    That term has always been meaningless when it comes to entrepreneurs. What could they possibly learn from academia? They have the idea, they have the motivation.

    • Re:college dropouts? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by netsavior ( 627338 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:14PM (#51825143)
      It is mostly something that people say to fool themselves into thinking it can happen to them. Ever notice these famous "college drop-outs" had the luxury of dropping out of prestigious and expensive universities? Someone drops out of Reed, Harvard, or Yale has a better chance of making it than someone who graduates from a state university.

      If you are already on third base, you don't have to hit the ball in order to score.

    • Re:college dropouts? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:22PM (#51825183) Homepage

      I wonder what the stats are about percentage of college dropouts (or never even attended college) who successfully started their own company vs percentage of college dropouts who tried to start their own company and failed vs percentage of college graduates who did the same. You hear all these stories of "So-And-So dropped out of college and started a multi-million-dollar company" but you don't hear the "So-And-So dropped out of college, tried to start his own business, failed miserably six months in amassing a ton in personal debt, and went to live in his parents' basement for the next three years while he tried to dig himself out of debt" stories.

      • Funny thing, but you find the same story among celebrities. Most TV, movie, and music superstars are (wait for it...) college dropouts.

        But to respond to your post: A look at Jobs' bio during his college years and shortly thereafter [wikipedia.org] does show that the man did live hand-to-mouth for quite awhile before the whole Apple thing:

        In a 2005 commencement speech for Stanford University, Jobs states that during this period, he slept on the floor in friends' dorm rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money, and got week

      • You don't hear about the ones that fail because well... they failed. The ones that have no education or dropped out who somehow reach star like status with success are often times bringing something new that they wouldn't have learned about in school.

        Les Paul would be a great example, no formal education, high school drop out, yet he managed to get not only into the rock and roll but also national inventor's hall of fame. If I remember correctly he may have been given an honorary doctorate in applied music

        • You don't hear about the ones that fail because well... they failed.

          That's exactly my point. People look at folks like Steve Jobs and see a bunch of people who dropped out of college or didn't go at all and who become huge successes. They think "well, if I drop out of college, I'll be a huge success." What they don't see are the hundreds or thousands of people who dropped out and are miserable failures for every big success. It's like posting photos of a spotless home but really just cropping out the me

  • If it wasn't for Carly Fiorina, HP would have been bigger and better

    • Re:Hewlett Packard (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:33PM (#51825231)

      HP was also started by two guys in a garage selling simple oscillators. HP was ruined by some crusty ratbag.

      IBM started selling meat scales and grinders. It's currently being ruined . . . by some crusty ratbag.

      And Yahoo . . . oh, never mind.

      The moral of the story? Keep your resume up to date. When the crusty ratbag is appointed as the CEO . . . bail . . . as fast as you can . . . it's turtles, all the way down.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      An interesting idea, but hard to see how HP wouldn't have fucked itself regardless.

      By most measures, Lewis Platt was doing a great job running the company but it seems like board got all worked up over short-term profits and glossy, Internet future thinking. If it hadn't been Carly Fiorina that screwed it up, the board would have hired some other big-talking glamour seeker who would have done the same kind of damage.

      But let's say it doesn't happen anyway -- the board likes Platt's job, and he continues as

  • Proprietary company always releasing products with features disabled and a mindset counter to freedom and choice. Proud to say I NEVER spent any money on Apple products.

  • Content-free article (Score:3)

    by plsuh ( 129598 ) <plsuh@@@goodeast...com> on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:10PM (#51825117) Homepage

    TFA is almost completely content-free. 4000 characters of wasted space. It looks like some financial writer was looking for clicks and is spouting the "Apple is doomed" meme again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cruff ( 171569 )
      I never see ads, have about three layers of blocking technology discarding the crap of today's web experience.

  • I miss OMG PONIES meme.

  • Apples hold their value (Score:5, Funny)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @03:33PM (#51825233)

    "They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units"

    And if you can find one of these units, they are still the most expensive product that Apple has ever sold

    • Re:Apples hold their value (Score:4, Informative)

      by macs4all ( 973270 ) on Friday April 01, 2016 @04:36PM (#51825473)

      "They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units"

      And if you can find one of these units, they are still the most expensive product that Apple has ever sold

      I have one (No fooling). "Serial No." written on the back of the PCB reads "0064". Fully decked-out with 8 kB RAM and that wonderful cassette interface board. Also has a case, Datatronics (IIRC) keyboard, and video RF modulator. With manuals, Woz's Integer BASIC on cassette (unfortunately a "dub" on a "Poly88"-labeled tape!), and a bunch of other Apple 1 software that I've scraped-up on a CD.

      Traded some computer work for it in 1977.

      Had it, one-owner, since then.

      I also have an original "Woz Pak", sent to me by Woz himself in 1978 (IIRC). And a couple of vintage Kilobaud and Byte magazines with articles like "Sweet 16: The 6502 Dream Machine", authored by Woz.

      Anyone interested?

      • A fully functional Apple I can go for... half a million dollars. No joke.

        • A fully functional Apple I can go for... half a million dollars. No joke.

          The Henry Ford museum in the USA paid $950K for one about a year ago.

          Why do you think I am being so careful to bring it back up again? So far, so good, BTW...

      • Not many people could afford it but with so many things signed by Woz and being PCB 64 on top of that, it could be worth a small fortune.

        • Not many people could afford it but with so many things signed by Woz and being PCB 64 on top of that, it could be worth a small fortune.

          If I can work out the logistics, I'm going to get Woz to sign mine. But if I can't work that out, Woz has already told me he would sign an affidavit attesting to the fact that he has known me since 1978, and knows that I have owned that since we first talked, etc...

          Yeah, the SN is written on the back of the PCB with black Sharpie, which is the way some of the first ones were.

  • In inflation adjusted dollars, they were still way ahead of Apple. Totally dominated multiple markets (not just press-domination, actual sales/revenue domination). And margins that still rival-or-exceed the best Apple ever had. I know it's not popular, but at their peak Microsoft was well beyond what the current Apple is.

    • at their peak

      Unfortunately, Microsoft's peak was sometime in the mid 1990s.

      • And, from the way revenue from the iPhone is starting to sag, in 20 years we'll be 17-18 years past Apple's peak. But comparing the peak of the two, at this point, shows that Apple comes up a bit short of Microsoft.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Wovel ( 964431 )

          And by sagging profits you mean Apple just earned the most profit in a quarter of any company in history.

          • Check the iPhone sales - they have plateaued, and iPads are down. Apple is near it's iDevice peak, meaning it's going to have to find something else to continue revenue growth. Oh, and Apple did not earn the most profit in a quarter by any company in history; it only did that if you don't adjust for inflation - but that's kind of cheating. If you adjust for inflation, Fannie Mae and ExxonMobil [wikipedia.org] crushed it over Apple.

            Look, Apple's performance has been amazing, but to ignore what happened before, to ignore

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by grumling ( 94709 )

              Gee, a company changes from a growth play to a profit/dividend play as the market matures and what is the reaction? Time to start digging the grave, they're finished. I remember what the press and analysts did to Microsoft under the Balmer years and think they got royally screwed. I mean, they were getting buried in cash coming in the door and yet Wall Street continued to complain that they weren't innovating enough. Now I hear the same story all the time with Apple. When a company gets to a certain size it

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MikeMo ( 521697 )
      Comparing a software company to a hardware company is not exactly a fair comparison. Of course a software company has high gross margins - they only manufacture the media and the boxes (back then). And a few keyboards and such.

  • Some critics think that Apple is boring now, setting itself up to iterate on its successes and lock customers into their services with products that are very good...but not those eye-popping leaps we've seen before.

    We don't really know what they are working on in their labs.

    I suspect the next leap with be some kind of "iGlasses", somewhat similar to Google Glass, but using hand-gestures in the air. The goggles will use 3D (stereoscopic) movement and image detection to understand the gestures.

    Google has alre

  • There are a lot of misconceptions about the early days of Apple. I would like to clarify some of them.

    - The recent attention on Steve Jobs is only partially warranted. Yes, it's true that without Jobs there would be no Apple. However, the movies imply that Jobs' role was to make Woz realize the potential of the personal computer. That is false. Woz knew the potential: he just didn't particularly care. Woz was only interested in making one for himself, and if anyone else cared then he happily shared the sche

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wovel ( 964431 )

      Well then he didn't really get it did he....

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by ExecutorElassus ( 1202245 )
      Let's not forget, either, that Apple's most visible growth period -- after Jobs' return, the introduction of the iMac, later the iPhone -- was also a period in which Apple was saving production costs by using suppliers that employed child labor [theguardian.com]. That article is from 2013; there are still investigations -- and potential charges -- going on now [bbc.com].

      Just keep that in mind when you fawn over Stev Jobs as some rogue market-disrupting genius: he made his billions with the help of child labor, indentured labor, conf

  • What a disconnect... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Forty years ago today, two college dropouts decided to start selling cobbled-together computers out of a garage in California because they couldn't afford the ones on the market."

    So they went on to produce the most overpriced and underpowered elitist garbage masquerading as a computer ever created. Moved on to essential obscurity by selling precious few of them overall in the scheme of things and saving the company only by dint of moving into the audio hardware industry while dodging taxes with superhuman

  • Apple has a lot of products, but only one that really matters: the iPhone.

    My understanding: Apple gets 60% of it's revenue, and 80% of it's profit from the iPhone.

  • 5 hit product lines

    Three (or four, if x86 -> x86_64 counts) architecture transitions inside one product line (68k -> PPC -> x86 -> x86_64)

    Two industries destroyed (music, mobile phones).

    One industry revolutionized (computing)

    That's pretty good for a company that's been going out of business for 40 years

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