Select a region
Apple’s 40-year history has been littered with products that have either created or re-defined different areas of the technology market. Here, we take a look at those products.
Apple GIF – Find & Share on GIPHY
The company’s first ever product was little more than a circuit board, but Steve Jobs insisted on Steve Wozniak’s neat placing of all components on the board for a better aesthetic, a trait he continued to push throughout his career.
Now complete with a keyboard and a screen, the Apple II was arguably the first example of a modern personal computer, with everything housed in one place.
80S GIF – Find & Share on GIPHY
The first Apple computer to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) comprising of windows and icons that would become the universal standard for every device that followed.
The computer designed to bring the technology to the masses for the first time. It came with a keyboard and a mouse and began a range that is still in existence today.
The product that still stands as the best example of getting it wrong, the Newton was Apple’s first attempt at a personal digital assistant. The signature handwriting recognition software was infamously unreliable and the Newton was discontinued in 1998.
A watershed moment because it announced Jobs’s return to Apple, as well as the beginning of Jony Ive’s design influence, seen in the left of the picture above. The bold colours were new for the computer industry, and more than a third of first-year sales went to people buying their first computer, introducing many to the internet for the first time.
Having redefined personal computing, Apple switched to music with the iPod, taking on the WalkMan and other portable music players by launching the iPod, which could hold up to 1,000 songs, substantially more than rival devices.
The device that helped make Apple the most valuable company in the world combined a phone, the internet and a music player. It essentially created the modern smartphone market and consumers loved it – more than 700 million have now been sold.
The tablet market already existed when the iPad was announced, but it was the iPad that made it relevant to everyday consumers. Several hundred million sales later and though the market is shrinking, Apple still leads it.
Apple Watch GIF – Find & Share on GIPHY
Smartwatches are still to catch on the way smartphones and tablets have, but the Apple Watch looks the most likely to make that happen. A fashion-conscious approach has seen it go on sale in Paris boutiques and even grace the cover of Vogue in China.
