Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. is an American electronics and software company founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, it operates a vertically integrated business model spanning personal computers, smartphones, tablets, wearables, and services. For the fiscal year ended 27 September 2025 Apple's Form 10-K reports net sales of US$416.2 billion and net income of US$112.0 billion; its market capitalisation has hovered in the US$3-4 trillion range, making it one of the largest listed companies in the world. On 20 April 2026 Apple announced that Tim Cook would become executive chairman of the board and that John Ternus, senior vice-president of hardware engineering, would become chief executive officer effective 1 September 2026.

History

Apple was founded on 1 April 1976 by its three co-founders. The Apple I sold that year was not a finished computer but an assembled circuit board; buyers supplied their own case and power supply. The Apple II of 1977 combined colour graphics with a floppy drive and, in combination with VisiCalc (1979), opened the category of "a PC you can use for business". The Macintosh of 1984 implemented at consumer price points the graphical user interface that originated at Xerox PARC's Alto. It did not set the template for Windows — Microsoft had begun that work in 1981, before the Mac shipped — but it did establish the GUI as something an ordinary buyer could expect for the price of a consumer product, and every later desktop was judged against it.

Jobs left after a boardroom defeat in 1985, and the Apple of the late 1980s and 1990s diluted itself through proliferating Performa SKUs, an unhappy PowerPC alliance with IBM and Motorola, and the failure of the Newton MessagePad. The 1997 acquisition of NeXT brought Jobs back as interim CEO; he cut unprofitable product lines and shipped the Bondi-blue iMac G3 in 1998, recasting the PC as a coloured household appliance. Mac OS X (2001) put the operating system on a Mach + BSD foundation; the iPod and the iTunes Store (2001-2003) reshaped the music industry; and the iPhone of 2007 effectively created the modern smartphone market. The iPad (2010), Apple Watch (2015), the migration to Apple Silicon from 2020, the Vision Pro headset (2024), and the Apple Intelligence features that began shipping with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 on 28 October 2024 have deepened Apple's hardware-OS-silicon-services vertical integration.

Products and Services

Net sales by category as disclosed in the FY2025 Form 10-K (year ended 27 September 2025; total US$416,161 m):

Services gross margin was 75.4 per cent in FY2025 against 46.9 per cent for the company as a whole, and the segment has become the principal counterweight to hardware-cycle dependence. Note that the reach metric Apple actually publishes is not "Apple IDs" but the installed base of active devices, which the company said passed 2.5 billion on its 29 January 2026 earnings call, up from 2.35 billion a year earlier. Apple's figure for what developers selling digital goods and services have earned on the App Store since 2008 is "more than $550 billion" (12 January 2026).

Key Events

• 1985: Jobs forced out; Wozniak also departs. John Sculley era.
• 1997: Microsoft invests US$150 million and ships Internet Explorer for Mac as part of a patent settlement. Steve Jobs returns as interim CEO.
• 2007: The original iPhone was unveiled on 9 January and went on sale on 29 June — in the United States only. The App Store followed in 2008, and Japan's first iPhone was the 3G, on 11 July 2008 through SoftBank Mobile.
• 2011: Death of Steve Jobs; Tim Cook becomes CEO.
• 2016: FBI demands that Apple unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, triggering a landmark encryption policy stand-off.
• 2020: M1 chip announced, beginning Apple's exit from Intel.
• 3 January 2022: Apple touches a US$3 trillion market capitalisation in intraday trading — the first company to do so. It did not close above US$3 trillion until 30 June 2023.
• 2024: Vision Pro launched (US on 2 February; China mainland, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore on 28 June; Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the UK on 12 July). To comply with the EU Digital Markets Act Apple grudgingly allowed alternative marketplaces and third-party payments inside the EU. Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC, with a partnership to bring ChatGPT into Siri via OpenAI; the first features actually shipped on 28 October in iOS 18.1, and Japanese arrived only with iOS 18.4 on 31 March 2025.
• 10 September 2024: The Court of Justice of the EU finalises a EUR 13 billion tax recovery order over Ireland; Apple loses.
• 2025: FY2025 sets records at US$416.2 bn of net sales and US$112.0 bn of net income. On IDC's estimates the iPhone shipped 247.4 million units in calendar 2025, up 6.1 per cent, putting Apple ahead of Samsung as the year's largest handset vendor for the first time in fourteen years.
• 20 April 2026: Apple announces that Tim Cook will become executive chairman and John Ternus will become CEO on 1 September 2026.

Key Metrics

All figures from the FY2025 Form 10-K (year ended 27 September 2025) unless stated.

• Net sales: US$416,161 m / Net income: US$112,010 m / Gross margin: 46.9%
• Employees: approximately 166,000 full-time equivalents
• Net sales by segment: Americas US$178,353 m; Europe US$111,032 m; Greater China US$64,377 m (15.5%, down 4% year on year); Japan US$28,703 m; Rest of Asia Pacific US$33,696 m
• Market capitalisation: US$3-4 trillion range, contending with Microsoft and NVIDIA for the world's most valuable company
• Installed base of active devices: over 2.5 billion (company statement, 29 January 2026)

Influence and Criticism

By refining a "walled garden" ecosystem Apple has reshaped industrial structure, but the same architecture has drawn continuous antitrust and labour scrutiny. Epic Games' lawsuit, filed in 2020, challenged the 30 per cent App Store fee and the ban on external payment links; a 2021 US ruling found Apple's anti-steering provisions illegal. The Digital Markets Act, fully applied from 2024, forces gatekeeper-designated firms to permit alternative app stores and sideloading, and Apple has only reluctantly adjusted its rules inside the EU. In March 2024 the US Department of Justice also sued Apple for maintaining a smartphone monopoly.

On the labour side, long-hour and dormitory-accident issues at Foxconn assembly lines in China, and the unionisation of US Apple Store staff (the Towson, Maryland store certified first, in June 2022), remain ongoing flashpoints. Environmentally Apple has committed to carbon neutrality by 2030. Its declaration that its own operations — retail stores, offices and data centres — run on 100 per cent renewable energy came in April 2018, and is a separate claim from the 2030 target; achieving the same across the supply chain still hinges on responsible sourcing of cobalt and rare earths. The privacy-as-differentiation strategy crystallised in App Tracking Transparency (2021) damaged Meta's advertising business directly and has settled into a recognisable Apple style of simultaneously deploying competition policy and rights rhetoric.

Finally, dependence on China and the attached geopolitical risk are unresolved. Greater China — mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan — produced US$64.4 billion of FY2025 net sales, 15.5 per cent of the total and the only reporting segment to shrink year on year. The bulk of Apple's manufacturing remains concentrated there. Diversification to India and Vietnam has accelerated but will continue to be a multi-year project.