On April first, 1976, 3 entreprenurial young men founded Apple Computer, Incorporated, with the intent to create and distribute personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne began with a dream of making computers smaller and more available to the public. They built their computers in Jobs' parent's garage & debuted the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they founded Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computer kits would be sold.

Jobs approached a local pc store, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty computer kits and paid five hundred dollars for each unit after much persuasion from Jobs, whose persuasive techniques have since become known as "the reality-distortion field". Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronics parts distributor. Using a number of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to acquire the parts needed while Wozniak and Wayne built the Apple I kits.

The next year, the Apple II was introduced and almost immediately became much more popular than its major competition, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, and was known derisively as the TRasH-80) and the Commodore 64, despite the fact that the price of the Apple was higher. One of the major advantages of the Apple was the development of the floppy disk drive and software.

The Apple II was selected by programmers to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program called VisCalc. This developed a substantial market for the Apple. The business market attracted many more software and hardware developers to the machine, and it also attracted home users in an effort to be compatible with their business computers.

Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just slightly better than the last. In 1984, Steve Jobs was on hand to introduce the Apple Macintosh as the "Computer for the rest of us". In 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable. However, this computer was actually extremely bulky and cumbersome and was met with mixed reviews. At this point, Apple hired industrial designers to develop a better, more portable personal computer.

In 1991, the Apple PowerBook was introduced. The PowerBook would provide the basic structure & form for the notebook computers we know today. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer of both desktop and laptop machines. The success of this notebook led to increased revenues and growing popularity of Apple in the computer market, and was followed up by the addition of the Apple iMac to their line of personal computers, in 1998. They also branched out into the music arena with the development of the iPod personal music player, which went on to grab an eighty percent market share.

Reflecting this expansion into other markets, on January 9, 2007, they changed their name from Apple Computer, Incorporated to simply Apple, Incorporated. While this company has had their ups and downs over the years, Apple has remained a solid presence in the desktop computer and laptop market. Their products have continued to evolve to meet the needs of both the business and individual user.