BY ASIF ALI KAZI

Steve Jobs & Development of personal computers at Apple Inc

Steve Jobs

American businessman designer and inventor.

Co founder and former CEO of Apple Inc.Widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer

of personal computer revolution.Jobs also co founded Pixar Animation Studio.

Beginning of Apple Computers

Steve Jobs Co founded Apple with his friend Steve Wozniak on April 1,1976.

Jobs and Wozniak were members of Homebrew Computer club.

Jobs met with Wozniak there.Steve jobs once said in interview that initially

he had not the setting up of company in mind.Initially both started to make computers for

themselves and for their friends.

Firs Apple computer

Apple I was the firs product of the Apple company which was designed and hand built by Wozniak

Jobs sold his sole means of transport a van to finance company’s cost of manufacturing.

Technology used in this computer was not more than that of modern day pocket culculator.

About 200 number of Apple I sold.

Introduction of Apple II

Introduced in 1977One of the highly successful mass produced

microcomputer products.Apple becomes Incorporation.Ease of use was a major attraction for Apple

I.5-6 million Apple II were sold.Before introduction of Apple II there was

problem of investment.

Apple II

Here comes Mike Markkula

Mike was American Entrepreneur and Angel Investor.

He Provided Earlier critical funding and managerial support.

With his support and skill apple was transformed form a partnership business to an incorporation.

Markkula invested $250,000 of which $80,000 was an equity investment and $170,000 was as a loan.

Introduction of VisiCalc

Apple II introduced first Killer Application of VisiCalc for business.

VisiCalc was first spreadsheet program available on Personal Computers.

VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II

Tense years and Failures

Apple introduced Apple III by the end 1970s.But it became a huge market failure.Jobs was in search of some innovation which

may turn around the state of Apple company and personal computers.

Jobs with Apple employee Jef Raskin visited PARC of Xerox Corporation.

There jobs saw GUI based PC which attracted the jobs.

Apple Lisa computer was the first personal computer to offer graphical user interface.

Apple Went Public…….

In 1980 apple went public and generating huge capital instantly creating more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history.

Period of Differences

Jobs was youngster of 23 years and not much experienced people started to defy his authority at Apple Inc.

Jobs ditched Apple Lisa project and wanted to work on Low cost Macintosh computers.

Apple Management favored Lisa and introduced Lisa which became technological success but market failure.

Introduction of Macintosh Computers

In 1984 Apple introduced Macintosh into market.

Macintosh debut was announced by World famous Advertisement directed by Ridley Scott.

Continued

The Macintosh initially fared well but follow up sells were not strong.

Jobs

Jobs was heading Macintosh division of Apple Inc.

Jobs Lured PepsCo CEO John Sculley to work for his company.

Jobs was persuasive and charismatic director of Apple but many people at Apple considered him temperamental manager.

A power struggle between Jobs and Sculley started to rise.

Jobs was compelled to resign after he was removed as head of Macintosh division.

NextComputers

In a speech jobs gave in Stanford University he said “being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him”

Jobs found Next Computers with $7 million capital.

Jobs bought The Graphics Group(Later Named as Pixar Animation Studio).

Jobs introduced the animation movies like Toy Story franchise, Cars franchise and The Incredibles etc.

Doom of Apple and return of Jobs to Apple.

Apple CEO John Scully apparently failed to effectively manage its product line and ultimately Apple’s Board kicked him out.

After the failure of apple CEOs Michael Spindler and Gel Amelio.

During the time of Gel Amelio the stock market of Apple tumbled and crippled financial position of Apple Inc.

Apple contacted its former founding CEO Steve jobs to run the affairs of company.

Era of Is

iMac

iMac is all in one desktop Macintosh computers evolved through 5 different forms.

iMac were introduced near the end of 20th century in 1998.

iMac G3 was the first iMac computer introduced in market.

Its uniqueness was that it contained Monitor and system unit both in one case.

Jobs said "It looks so good you want to lick it"

iMac

Different Models of iMac

iPod

iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc.

iPod classic is hard drive based and all other models like Shuffle ,Nano etc. are flash memory based.

Storage capacity varies from 2GB for iPod Shuffle to 160 GB for iPod Classic.

Supporting software is iTunes which revolutionized digital music market.

iPod

Era of Portability

Apple introduced iPhone in 2007 and followed by iPad in 2010.

iPhone is a line of smart phones designed and marketed by Apple Inc.

There are five geneartions of iPhone models.The iPhone 4S added a higher resolution camera (8

megapixel) with 1080p video recording.iPhone 4s is the first smart phone which used

SIRI(Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface).This application uses human voice to answer

questions, make recommendations, and perform actions.

Steve Becomes Celebrity

Steve returned apple as an interim CEO often ironically termed by him as iCEO.

Under his leadership apple from brink of bankruptcy became profitable by 1998.

Over the next decade, Jobs oversaw the development of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and on the services side, the company's Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Store and the App Store.

Apple became world’s most valuable publicly traded company in 2011.

Steve jobs has widely been termed as visionary, legendary perfectionist etc.

He has been described as "Father of the Digital Revolution” , "master of innovation“, "design perfectionist”.

“One last thing…”

Steve possessed a capability which his friends and foes termed as "reality distortion field”.

It simply means Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm and charisma.

End of Era………

In August 2011 jobs resigned as CEO Apple Inc. but remained with the company as chairman of company’s board.

His design sense was greatly influenced by the Buddhism which he experienced in India while on a seven-month spiritual journey.

In october 2003 jobs was diagnosed with cancer.

Recommendations

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”

iThanks