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On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born. Although the original five hundred Apple I computers were kits aimed primarily at the hobbyist market, the Apple II was a complete machine that came in a warm tan case made of plastic with rounded edges and corners. The Apple II was also innovative in using floppy disks rather than magnetic tape to load programs and data into working memory, speeding up access to stored information. This design required more expensive parts than Wozniak and Jobs had capital to purchase. As a result, Jobs had to woo venture capitalists, a process made difficult by his own lack of business experience. However, investor Mike Markkula was open-minded enough to see the potential of these two young men's plans and was willing to work out such fundamentals as a business plan and a formal budget. Satisfied that they could take his advice, Markkula secured them funding and moved them out of their garage workshop into a building in Cupertino, California. On January 3, 1977, formal incorporation papers were signed and Apple Computer, Inc., became a legal entity.

Jobs refused to be satisfied with the success of the Apple II, which still required the user to type commands into a command-line interface. He had become convinced that the personal computer could succeed only if it became an appliance, its inner workings effectively invisible to the end user. During a visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Jobs saw an experimental graphical user interface (GUI). The point-and-click simplicity so impressed him that he decided to base Apple's next generation of computers on them, and thus was born the Macintosh, or Mac, released shortly after the 1984 Super Bowl game.

By 1985, trouble had come to Apple, and Jobs was ousted from his own company by John Sculley, the very man he had brought from PepsiCo to help Apple get through the "adolescent transition" between small business and major corporation. Set adrift, Jobs started another computer company, NeXT, to design a high-powered graphics workstation. However, the market was not yet ripe for that particular niche, and NeXT struggled for several years before getting out of the hardware business entirely and concentrating on the NEXTSTEP operating system (OS). Jobs had more success as the head of Pixar, a company dedicated to graphics processing for the motion-picture industry. Although the earliest versions of Toy Story (1995) were rejected by Disney, a revised version proved a box-office runaway.

In 1997, Apple was in bad shape, and there was a serious possibility that it would close its doors altogether. The Macintosh operating system that had been so innovative in 1984 had not received a serious makeover in years, and competition from Microsoft Windows was intense. After trying several stopgap measures, Apple executives finally approached Jobs in order to gain access to the NEXTSTEP OS as the basis of a new version of the Mac OS. After several months of delicate negotiations, Jobs returned to Apple and simplified the company's confused product line. In 1998, he introduced the iMac, a compact computer with innovative universal serial bus (USB) connectors.

By the year 2000, Apple was back on its feet again, and the 2001 introduction of the iPod music player secured its future as a growing company. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the iPod went through multiple versions, eventually spawning the iPhone, a combination cellular phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), and music player with a slick, sophisticated interface.

Jobs has been a force for ongoing innovation in the computer and personal electronics industry, consistently anticipating consumers' needs and seeking to create products that would fill those needs even before people knew they had them. However, his insistence on technical elegance has often meant that his products have borne a premium price tag that not all users have been willing to pay, leaving his companies vulnerable to being undercut by competitors willing to produce a product of lesser quality that is merely good enough rather than the very best. Nevertheless, Jobs reinvigorated Apple after he returned to the company in 1997 and introduced a simplified product line that included the iMac. . .

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