Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. is an American multinational company, the designer and manufacturer of many software and consumer electronics products. They are best known for Macintosh computers, iPod portable media players and the iPhone.

Previous to January 9 2007, the company was known as Apple Computer Inc., but removed "Computer" to reflect its expansion into the wider electronics market; the iPod Touch and iPhone are now Apple's most profitable product category.

In 2008, Fortune magazine found 'Apple' to be the most admired company in America.

History
Apple was founded in California on April 1 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne. The company's first product was the Apple I (also called Apple-1), hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at a local computer hobbyist group called "The Homebrew Computer Club". It was the first single circuit board computer and came with a video interface, 8k of RAM and a keyboard. Despite this, by modern standards it came with less than can be considered a complete personal computer(PC). At a price of $666.66, around two hundred Apple Is were built (by Wozniak and Jobs) and sold over a ten month period.

In 1977, Apple Computers became incorporated and released the Apple II. This model was priced at $1298, and boasted many improvements over its predecessor (despite being based on the same 6502 processor as the Apple I); it was the first PC to have colour graphics and used an audio cassette drive for storage. The Apple II was considered a success.