Apple TV

Apple TV was unveiled as a work in progress called "iTV" at a press conference in San Francisco, California on September 12, 2006. Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated a modified Front Row interface using the Apple Remote. Industry experts described the appliance as a "short Mac Mini". Jobs announced that Apple would start taking pre-orders for Apple TV on January 9, 2007, at the Macworld Conference & Expo. The name "iTV" was originally going to be used to keep it in line with the rest of their i based products (iPhone, iPad, iPod) etc., but was not used because television broadcaster ITV holds the rights to the name in the UK and threatened to take legal action against Apple.

Apple TV started shipping on March 21, 2007.Apple released a 160GB model on May 31, 2007; it discontinued the 40GB version on September 14, 2009.

At Macworld 2008 on January 15, 2008, Jobs announced a major (and free) software upgrade to the Apple TV. Dubbed "Take Two", the upgrade turned the Apple TV into a stand-alone device that no longer required a computer running iTunes on Mac OS X or Windows to stream or sync content to it. Jobs said, "Apple TV was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer. It was not what people wanted. We learned what people wanted was movies, movies, movies."The update also allowed the device to rent and purchase content from iTunes directly, as well as download podcasts and stream photos from MobileMe (.Mac at the time) and Flickr.

The second-generation Apple TV was unveiled during an Apple press conference on September 1, 2010.

iPhone 4

The iPhone 4 is a touchscreen smartphone developed by Apple Inc. It is the fourth generation iPhone, and successor to the iPhone 3GS. It is particularly marketed for video calling (marketed by Apple as FaceTime), consumption of media such as books and periodicals, movies, music, and games, and for general web and e-mail access. It was announced on June 7, 2010, at the WWDC 2010 held at the Moscone Center, San Francisco,and was released on June 24, 2010, in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan.

The iPhone 4 runs Apple's iOS operating system, the same operating system as used on previous iPhones, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. It is primarily controlled by a user's fingertips on the multi-touch display, which is sensitive to fingertip contact.

The most noticeable difference between the iPhone 4 and its predecessors is the new design, which incorporates an uninsulated stainless steel frame that acts as the device's antenna. The internal components of the device are situated between two panels of chemically strengthened aluminosilicate glass. It has an Apple A4 processor and 512 MB of eDRAM, twice that of its predecessor and four times that of the original iPhone. Its 3.5-inch (89 mm) LED backlit liquid crystal display with a 960×640 pixel resolution is marketed as the "Retina Display".

The latest operating system release is iOS 5.0.

In October 2011, the iPhone 4S was announced, which retains the same form factor but includes many upgrades such as the A5 processor, iOS 5, and an improved camera

History

On April 19, 2010, gadget website Gizmodo reported that they had purchased an iPhone prototype for $5000, and furthermore, had conducted a product teardown of the device. The prototype is reported to have been lost by an Apple employee, Gray Powell, in Redwood City, California. Shortly after Gizmodo published detailed information about the prototype, Apple's legal associates formally requested for the phone to be returned to Apple, and Gizmodo responded with the intent to cooperate. On April 22, officers from the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) task force of the California HTTAP Program raided the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor responsible for reviewing the prototype, seizing all of his computers and hard drives.The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the raid as violating journalist source protection laws that forbid the seizure of journalist computers as well as the suspicion that Apple had used its influence as a member of the steering committee which is charged with direction and oversight of the California REACT task force to push police into action in a way that would not normally be conducted for this type of incident. Apple had already received the iPhone prototype prior to the raid when it was returned by Gizmodo.The District Attorney has stated that the investigation has been suspended, and discontinued searching through the Gizmodo editor's belongings as they determine whether the shield laws are applicable, and cautioned that no charges have been issued at this point

Ronald Gerald Wayne

Ronald Gerald Wayne (born May 17, 1934) founded Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) with Steve Wozniak and the late CEO Steve Jobs but soon gave up his share of the new company for a total of $2,300


Biography

Wayne was born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. He worked with Steve Jobs at Atari before he, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. Serving as the venture's "adult supervision", Wayne drew the first Apple logo, wrote the three men's original partnership agreement,and wrote the Apple I manual.

Wayne received a 10% stake in Apple but relinquished his stock for US$800 less than two weeks later, on April 12, 1976. Legally, all members of a partnership are personally responsible for any debts incurred by any partner; unlike Jobs and Wozniak, 21 and 25, Wayne had personal assets that potential creditors could seize. The failure of a slot machine company that he had started five years earlier also contributed to his decision to exit the partnership.

Later that year, venture capitalist Arthur Rock and Mike Markkula helped develop a business plan and convert the partnership to a corporation. Wayne received another check, for $1,500, for his agreement to forfeit any claims against the new company. In its first year of operations (1976), Apple's sales reached US$174,000. In 1977, sales rose to US$2.7 million, in 1978 to US$7.8 million, and in 1980 to US$117 million. By 1982 Apple had a billion dollars in annual sales. He claimed that he did not regret selling the stock as he had made the "best decision with the information available to me at the time."

Wayne also stated that he felt the Apple enterprise "would be successful, but at the same time there would be bumps along the way and I couldn't risk it. I had already had a rather unfortunate business experience before. I was getting too old and those two were whirlwinds. It was like having a tiger by the tail and I couldn't keep up with these guys."}} Had he kept his 10% stock it would be worth over 35 billion dollars today (August 2011).

After Apple, Wayne resisted Jobs's attempts to recruit him back to Apple, remaining at Atari until 1978 when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and later a Salinas, California electronics company.He is retired and sells stamps, rare coins, and gold from his Pahrump, Nevada home, and had never owned an Apple product until September 5, 2011, when he was given an iPad 2 by Aral Balkan at the Update Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom.

Wayne also ran a stamp shop in Milpitas, California for a short period of time in the late '70s, "Wayne's Philatelics", on Dempsey Road. After a number of break-ins he moved his stamp operations to Nevada. Interestingly, his logo for the business was a wood-cut style design, with a man sitting under an apple tree, with the "Wayne's Philatelics" name written in a flowing ribbon curved around the tree. This particular logo is interesting because it was the original logo he designed for Apple Computer.

He holds a dozen patents but never had enough capital to make money off any of them.

Wayne is planning to publish a memoir titled, Adventures of an Apple Founder, to be initially available exclusively on the Apple iBookstore, then most major book sellers later in 2011.

Wayne has also written a socio-economic treatise titled "Insolence of Office", which he describes as

...the product of decades of research and observation into the evolution of human governance, and the foundations of the American Constitutional Republic. Through this analysis the reader is introduced to a complete, yet simplified understanding of the architecture of our Constitution, its foundations, principles, and the essential meaning of its structure all in the context of modern living.

"Insolence of Office" is also to be released in 2011

Steve Wozniak

In 1970, Wozniak became friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs worked for the summer at a company where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.According to Wozniak's autobiography, iWoz, Jobs had the idea to sell the computer as a fully assembled printed circuit board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs's Volkswagen van), raised USD $1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs's bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs' garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and some computer games Wozniak had developed, similar to SuperPong but with voice overs to the blips on the screen.

Excerpt from the Apple I design manual, including Wozniak's hand-drawn diagrams

By 1971, one year after enrolling, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley and developed the computer that eventually made him famous. By himself he designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I.^[3] With the Apple I design, he and Jobs were largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists very interested in computing, one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over several years. Unlike other Home Brew competitors, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that immediately created buzz and drew a crowd when it was unveiled.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Their first product, the Apple I computer, was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of these cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user. The Apple I was priced at $666. (Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." It was $500 plus a 1/3 markup, which is actually $666.67, rounding up to the nearest penny.) Jobs and Wozniak sold their first fifty system boards to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California.

CEO Apple Steve Jobs

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs ( February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American inventor and businessman widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was co-founder and previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.

In the late 1970s, Jobs—along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others—designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios. He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006,making Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors. Apple's 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its interim CEO from 1997, then becoming permanent CEO from 2000 onwards, spearheading the advent of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. From 2003, he fought a eight-year battle with cancer,and eventually resigned as CEO in August 2011, while on his third medical leave. He was then elected chairman of Apple's board of directors.

On October 5, 2011, around 3:00 p.m., Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, aged 56, six weeks after resigning as CEO of Apple. A copy of his death certificate indicated respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with "metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor" as the underlying cause. His occupation was listed as "entrepreneur" in the "high tech" business.