Company
ActiveApple
Cupertino · Since 1976
Still independent. The Apple II was a small-business machine before the IBM PC. The iPhone made it, for a time, the most valuable public company.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976. The Apple II, released the next year, was a finished computer a small business could buy, with a case, a keyboard, and a spreadsheet, VisiCalc, that justified the price. IBM's PC came later. Apple was already a company that sold to offices.
The Macintosh in 1984 made the screen a place of pictures and type. The iPhone in 2007 made a computer something a person carried, and the App Store in 2008 made other people's software a stall Apple operated. Each of those objects created a different workforce, inside Apple and outside it.
Design, retail, and a factory elsewhere
Apple employs designers, software engineers, and the staff of stores it chose to run itself. The devices are assembled, largely, by workers at contractors such as Foxconn, who are not Apple employees and whose conditions have repeatedly become the story. A history of Apple's work that counts only Cupertino is incomplete. The company organized a manufacturing system it does not directly employ, which is one of the patterns of this later catalogue.
Still the most watched
Apple remains independent. For long stretches of the past decade it was the most valuable public company, which is a market fact, not a measure of how many people it hires. Warehouses and carriers employ more. Apple employs the people who decide what those larger workforces build. Chapters after 2030 that include Apple in a projection are guessing about a role. The company on this page is the one incorporated in 1977 and still selling the machines.
The work it organized
- Industrial designer
- Software engineer
- Retail specialist
- Contract assembler