Apple
Apple is the most profitable consumer products company ever built. In 1997 it was months from insolvency, and the money that kept it open came from the company it had spent twenty years defining itself against.
The Cheque From the Enemy
In August 1997, Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple.
The announcement was made at Macworld in Boston, with Bill Gates appearing by video link on a screen above the stage. The audience booed him.
Strip away the theatre and the transaction is unusually clear-eyed on both sides. Apple needed cash and a commitment that Microsoft Office would keep being written for the Mac, without which the Mac was finished in every office in the world. Microsoft needed Apple to keep existing, because an antitrust case was closing in and a monopolist with a visibly surviving competitor is in a better position than one without.
By the end of 1997, Apple had returned to profit — $309 million.
Everything the company is now stands on top of that year.
Los Altos, 1976
Apple was founded on 1 April 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, at the home of Jobs’s parents in Los Altos, California. It was incorporated in Cupertino on 3 January 1977.
The first product, the Apple I, was designed by Wozniak and priced at $666.66. The Apple II followed on 16 April 1977 and became the first mass-produced personal computer — the machine that took the computer out of the laboratory and put it on a desk in a house.
Apple listed on 12 December 1980, selling 4.6 million shares at $22 and raising over $100 million. It closed its first day worth $1.778 billion, and made instant millionaires of more than three hundred employees and investors.
Ronald Wayne had sold his ten per cent stake back to the other two, less than two weeks after the founding, for $800.
The Twelve Years Without Him
In 1985 Jobs was removed from the Lisa project and resigned that September. Wozniak had already stepped back.
What followed is the part of Apple’s history that gets compressed into a sentence, and it should not be. For twelve years the company had competent management, real products and a shrinking position. It was not destroyed by a single catastrophe. It was worn down by a long run of decisions that each looked reasonable and together lost it the market: too many models, licensing the Mac operating system to clone makers, an operating system rewrite that could not be finished.
That is the ordinary way a company dies. Slowly, sensibly, one defensible choice at a time.
1997
Apple bought NeXT — the company Jobs had founded after leaving — for $427 million, and with it acquired both an operating system foundation and its former founder. Jobs became de facto leader.
He cut the product line to a handful of machines, took the Microsoft investment, and in May 1998 shipped the iMac, which sold around 800,000 units in five months.
The iMac mattered less as a computer than as a statement of method: one clear product, decided by a small group, shipped without options. That method is the actual invention of the second Apple.
The Detour That Became the Company
The iPod arrived on 10 November 2001 and sold over 100 million units within six years. The iTunes Store followed in 2003 and passed five billion downloads by June 2008.
It is easy to forget how strange this was. A computer manufacturer in visible decline chose to build a music player, and then went further and became a music retailer, negotiating with record labels that had no reason to deal with it.
The iPod taught Apple three things it would need six years later: how to design a handheld device, how to run a store that sells other people’s content, and how to negotiate with an industry that did not want to be disrupted. Without those three, the iPhone is not possible.
2007
The iPhone was announced on 9 January 2007 and released on 29 June 2007. It sold 270,000 units in the first thirty hours.
The App Store opened in July 2008 and was generating a million dollars a day within a month. The iPad was announced on 27 January 2010, released on 3 April, and sold more than 300,000 on its first day.
The App Store is the piece that changed the shape of the business. Apple stopped being a company that sold you a device and became a company that took a percentage of everything you did on it — a position it has since been forced to defend in courts and regulators on several continents.
Jobs resigned as chief executive on 24 August 2011 and died on 5 October. Tim Cook took over the same day Jobs stepped down.
Where the Money Actually Comes From
For the financial year ended 27 September 2025, Apple reported revenue of $416 billion and net income of $112 billion, with about 166,000 employees and 540 stores.
The composition matters more than the total. The iPhone is more than half of revenue. The Mac is around eight per cent, the iPad seven, wearables and accessories about nine. Services — the App Store, subscriptions, payments, the search deal — is the remainder, and it is the fastest-growing and highest-margin part.
So the honest description of Apple in 2026 is a single-product company with an extremely large attachment business. That is a strong position and a narrow one. It also explains why regulators keep arriving: a great deal of the services revenue comes from Apple’s ability to set the terms on a device the customer has already bought.
Apple passed $1 trillion in 2018, the first US public company to do so, $2 trillion on 19 August 2020, and stood just above $4 trillion in October 2025.
Making Its Own Chips
In 2020 Apple announced it would stop buying processors for the Mac and design its own, and shipped the first M1 machines the same year.
It is the most consequential engineering decision of the Cook era, and the reasoning is the same one that runs through the whole company. Apple has always preferred to own the layer everyone else rents. It owned the operating system when rivals licensed one; it owned the store when rivals sold through carriers; now it owns the silicon.
Each of those choices cost more upfront and bought control that competitors could not match later.
After Cook
On 1 September 2026, Tim Cook stepped down after fifteen years and John Ternus became chief executive.
Cook took over a company that had just invented the smartphone and was told for a decade that he was a supply-chain manager standing in a visionary’s shoes. He then multiplied its revenue several times over, built the services business, moved the Mac onto Apple silicon, and handed on the most profitable consumer company in history.
What he did not do is introduce a product category as large as the iPhone. The Watch is successful; the Vision Pro, announced June 2023 and released February 2024, is not yet. Apple Intelligence arrived in 2024 into a market already crowded.
That is the inheritance. Ternus takes over a company with extraordinary margins, a regulatory problem on three continents, and the same question Apple has faced since 2011 — what the next thing is, when the current thing is more than half the revenue.
Common Questions
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How This Was Written
Figures are as at the date of publication.
Photography is public domain or CC0 and is credited in the site’s image credits. Corrections: commissions@99founder.com.
