Did you know that every Apple commercial video displays the time as 9:41 am? This was the time Steve Jobs unveiled the first-ever Apple iPhone. Apple is a very unusual company and today, I'd be sharing with you some interesting things you should know about the company.
To begin with, multiple tests have shown that the way the MacBook was constructed, it can stop several bullets in its path. I don't encourage you to try out this theory though. I just watched a video about it and I thought it was really cool.
We all know that Apple is a wealthy company, as a matter of fact, they're the first and only company to ever reach the trillion-dollar mark. But it is very difficult to conceptualize just how wealthy they are. To kinda give you an idea though, the company makes over $300,000 of revenue PER MINUTE, and in 2011, Apple overtook the US Government in terms of cash in hand. What is even more impressive is that if you took Apple's current net worth and you donated it, you could give every single human being on the planet over $100.
Apple originally had three co-owners: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. While you might have already heard of Jobs and Wozniak, you probably don't know who Wayne is. This is a very tragic story though because Wayne left the company after only 12 days, selling his entire share in the company for only $800. However, if he had held onto his share of the company, it would be worth well over $30,000,000,000 today.
Apple had a really difficult start. Money was very short in supply. It was so bad that Steve Jobs had to sell his car and Wozniak had to sell his scientific calculator for them to raise funds back then.
There have been a lot of theories as to where the brand name, Apple, came from. I've heard things from scientific to biblical explanations but it happens that Steve Jobs was on a fruit-only diet at the time and he just happened to really like apples. I guess that was the source of the name, the rest is history.
The company's logo has gone through a lot of transformations. It started off as a picture of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree explaining what gravity was as an apple fell onto him. But a year later, they changed it to something much more similar to what it is now but with rainbow stripes across the apple to indicate that their computer was the first to have a color screen. The reason why it has the bitten part in it was to make it clear that it was an apple not any other rounded fruit like an onion or tomato. The logo went through several adjustments, essentially just getting simpler every time until it landed at what they have now.
Apple is very crazy when it comes to their attention to detail. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak both worked at a game development company called Atari before they developed Apple and there have been a lot of subtle demonstrations of this. For example, in the first iPod, there was a hidden Easter Egg game you could play that was developed by Jobs and Wozniak during their former job at Atari.
You've probably heard about Siri and you very much associate it with Apple. However, that was not always the case. Siri was, in fact, a stand-alone app on Apple's app store and was originally made to work with Android and even Blackberry devices, until Apple decided to acquire it and build it exclusively into their own devices. The voice of Siri ended up being a lady called Susan Bennett but was very nearly Jeff Goldblum, an actor famous for his roles in a whole number of movies.
Apple has worked on several interesting projects over the years. They were the first to build a digital color camera. This was huge at the time because before. people would usually wait for weeks after taking a picture before they could see it. Apple also developed a game console called Pippin which was selling for $600 at the time. But now, almost all smartphones come with built-in game consoles. It even gets more bizarre. Apple launched a clothing line. The entire collection was made up of crazy looking clothing items that were launched in 1986. To be fair, it might have been fashionable at the time though... maybe.
Initial Apple computers were made with the logos upside down to avoid confusion, because most people will try opening the laptops the wrong way, from the base of the apple. The company later gave in and agreed to flip the logo because it did look pretty odd.
Also, the Anniversary Macintosh, in today's terms, this would almost be like the Mac Pro Pro. It came in at $7500, which in 1997 was a lot of money. And it was not just like the ultimate machine, but it would be hand-delivered by a limousine and set up by a man wearing a tuxedo.
Speaking of MacBooks, the command key on the keyboard has a very unique symbol on it. Turns out it was actually borrowed from a Swedish road sign meaning a place of interest.
In 2007, the iPhone was unveiled. After ten years, Apple lost the right to use the iPhone trademark in Brazil. Turns out there was already a company in Brazil called "Gradiente" which already had its own brand of iPhones. More interestingly is the fact that the initial iPhones launched in 2007 were built with plastic display components and by the time Steve was done with the presentation, the screen of the particular phone he was using was already scratched. He then told the team that before the official launch of the phones, the screens should be changed to glass. Another fascinating fact was that Steve made sure that the software engineers never saw the hardware engineers and vice versa so that no rebel would be able to develop an iPhone and claim ownership... kinda like copyright measures.
Apple product prices vary massively across regions of the world. This could be due to things like import duties, taxes, foreign exchange rates, and the likes. This means that whilst the iPhone XS Max was $1250 in the US for the 256GB model, it ended up being around $1700 in India and around $2000 in Brazil.
An iPhone is built with around 75 known elements. That's almost two-thirds of the entire periodic table of all the elements known to man. So it's not surprising that in the hardware components of the phone, there are materials made of gold, silver, and platinum.
The way touch-ID in Apple devices works is based on a series of intense technology that involves using the idea that our bodies conduct electricity. This means that a dead person or a 3D figure with the exact fingerprints will not be able to unlock the phone using touch-ID. However, if it depended solely on the optical scanner built into other smartphones like Samsung, it would work.
There are so many interesting facts about Steve Jobs himself. He has been tagged several things like a visionary leader and even some not so positive things like a difficult person to work with. There was a time when he actually left Apple, the very own company he built. During the time he left, he helped to fund several successful businesses like the company known today as PIXAR, the creators of the Toy Story. He was also known to be a bit quirky. For example, we all know that companies usually hand out employee numbers, right? Exactly. He was given the number #02 while Wozniak was given #01 and after several series of complaints, he eventually got the number #00. However, for a very long time, he only took a salary of $1 per year. He was so committed to the success of the company that he chose to leave millions within the company as opposed to spending all of the money on himself. He also always wore what seemed like the exact same turtleneck and he even wanted to introduce a uniform policy into Apple. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer :( and Tim Cook, the current CEO of Apple, at the time, found out that his blood type matched with Jobs and offered to donate a part of his liver but Jobs turned down the offer. He died in October 2011. The day after, the iPhone 4S was announced.
Now, let's talk about Steve Wozniak. Honestly, not very much is said about him. He was involved in a plane crash while at Apple and had some pretty serious head injuries, causing him to suffer from severe short term memory from which he never recovered.
Apple and Samsung, with their very long history of suing each other, are actually very co-dependent. The OLED displays on iPhones are sourced from Samsung and this obviously, helps feed Samsung's business.
Tim Cook, the current CEO of Apple, was also from a very modest background. He started off as a newspaper vendor and now he has contributed massively to the current success of the company. He is very hardworking and has been said to send out emails as early as 4:30 am in the morning.
You might know that a good portion of Apple products is manufactured in China, and from there, there are two major ways of getting them across to other countries. Many companies use ships but Apple solely sends its products by air, because it's faster and less prone to damage. Even though it can be up to ten times more expensive.
It is NOT easy to work for Apple. When the company's Manhattan store opened, it had over 10,000 job applications but they accepted just 200 people, which is about 2%. As of 2013, the average corporate Apple employee was earning about $120,000 per year.
Finally, to probably my favorite fact, I mentioned earlier that every Apple commercial video displays the time as 9:41 am. This is because Apple launch events always start at 9:00 am, and the phone reveal occurs 40 minutes into the presentation. So Jobs insisted that the time on the phone must always be the exact time that it actually is during the reveal, with one extra minute for "breathing room". This is just an example of the kind of attention to detail in Apple that you'd probably not find in other companies.
"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." - Steve Jobs, co-founder Apple computer, co-creator of iTunes and the iPhone.
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