Usually when you speak of a significant figure with Apple, you mean Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. Yet on this April 1 -- the 40th birthday of the company -- we want to examine 40 other figures. Numbers. Digits. The history of Apple as sliced up into numbers. Though speaking of slicing history, do make sure you're reading the year-long
MacNN series that
examines each week for what happened then across 1976 to today.
There is one number we've left out, though. As we tip our hats and raise our glasses to Apple for 40 years, we're proud to tell you that
MacNN itself is now in its 20th anniversary year. We're one of the very few Apple-specific sites that has made it this far, and a lot has changed to put it mildly. With our features, columns, podcasts, and live event coverage, alongside our day-to-day reports on everything of note in the Apple and greater tech world, we feel ready for the next 20 years -- but we would never have gotten this far without you, the readers and sponsors. Thank you. And now, the numbers.
0 -- The number of Apple's rival computer manufacturers from 1976 who survived, and sell computers today. Zero.
1 -- Steve Jobs' annual salary from Apple when he returned in the late 1990s was $1. He's said to have joked that 50 cents of it was performance related.
1 -- The creator of the world's first spreadsheet, Daniel Fylestra, offered it to Apple for $1 million in 1979, but was turned down. Microsoft said no too. It might have been because of his haircut.
1 -- One billion Apple devices are in active use today
1 -- There were one million downloads on the first day of the Mac App Store
1.8 -- Toshiba engineers happened to mention to Apple that they'd developed a 1.8-inch hard drive, but didn't know what they'd ever do with it. Apple turned it into the iPod.
2.2 -- John Sculley's salary of $2.2m earned him the title of highest-paid executive in Silicon Valley in 1987. Later, CEO Gil Amelio would have a salary so complicated with bonuses and benefits that it's hard to pin down, but is believed to have been between $10m and $12m a year.
5 -- Steve Jobs was making $5 per hour in 1974 as Atari employee number 40. He may have been rolling in money in other ways, though, as part of his job included working on coin-op arcade games.
6 -- In 1987, Apple took six Mac Plus machines off the assembly line, and claimed each of them as the one millionth Mac. It's not clear what happened to five of them, but one was presented to Jef Raskin, arguably the creator of the Mac, who was ousted from Apple by Steve Jobs. We'll also have to guess what happened to the sixth of them, then.
7 -- Apple spent seven years suing Microsoft for how Windows was allegedly a ripoff of the Mac. We should drop the word "allegedly," as after seven years and $10m in legal fees, Apple lost. It even deserved to, because where Microsoft couldn't beat it with technology, it was world-class in business contracts, and Apple was dreadful.
10 -- It's said that Steve Jobs paid George Lucas $10 million for Pixar in 1986. Effectively yes, but if you want to be picky then really he paid Pixar that money, and Pixar bought itself out from Lucasfilm. It's only a significant hair split because Lucasfilm got $5 million, and the rest was capital investment for Pixar. Jobs was an investor then, owning reportedly 70 percent of the firm, and it was only later when Pixar got into trouble and he invested more that he became a 100 percent owner.
11 -- The best and latest information says that Apple Music has at least 11m paying subscribers. So it's being beaten by Spotify, but at least it's not another Ping.
12 -- The number of days Apple co-founder Ron Wayne stayed with the company.
15 -- We've had OS X for 15 years. There was a long overlap wth the so-called Classic Mac OS,as OS X came in beta and then OS 9 stayed in Classic mode, but if you want to draw a line in the sand, then the original operating system lasted for 16 years. Some of us still think of OS X as the new one, but we're looking increasingly daft.
16 -- Popular opinion said that nobody bought the Mac G4 Cube, but 16 of them powered the bridge displays in Star Trek: Enterprise.
17 -- The iPhone originally shipped with a whopping 17 apps, and we didn't even think to call them that then. Phone, Mail, Safari, and the rest were all we got, and all we thought we were going to get, as you couldn't add to them -- and there weren't any to add.
18 -- This is approximately how much money Apple has earned so far in 2016. That would be 18 ... billion dollars.
20 -- Not Apple's finest hour: 20 percent of Apple III buyers found that their shiny new computers were dead on arrival. It was because processors were getting unseated in transit, so the official Apple support advice was to pick up your Apple III to a height of six inches over your desk and drop it. Honestly. Picture an Apple Genius telling you that now.
21 -- Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple.
25 -- Steve Wozniak was 25.
25 -- Jony Ive joined Apple full time in 1992, when he was 25. He's still there, you may have noticed, but before 1992 he'd been doing various consulting work via other design firms that Apple had hired. Apple reportedly spent two years trying to convince him to join. Hardly worth their effort, really. The photo (via
Melarumors.com) is from around his student days, which is when he first came across Apple products.
35 -- Moulded into the inside of the original Mac's plastic casing is a series of approximately 35 autographs. They're the artist's signatures of people who worked to create the Mac, and they signed at a party on February 10, 1982. The Mac wouldn't be released for nearly two years, but they didn't know that then.
40 -- A 40-mile stretch of the Santa Clara Valley in California became forever known as Silicon Valley after
Electronic News writer Dan Hoefler coined the term in January, 1971. Before then, the area was better known for its orchards, and was called the Valley of Heart's Delight. Sounds like a romance novel. We should write that. Anyway: the Homebrew Computer Club met in the area, and companies you've heard of even today have their headquarters there: Adobe, eBay, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard (now HP), Google, Intel, Netflix, and Apple.
41 -- Ronald Wayne's age when he co-founded Apple. We're building to something here with references to his age (20 years older than Jobs), and how long he lasted at Apple. You'll see.
128 -- This is the amount of RAM in the original Mac. It wasn't enough, and even the model that Steve Jobs famously demonstrated had really been boosted to 512k. Notice that letter though: this is RAM measured in kilobytes instead of gigabytes. Today you can get an iMac that has 32GB, and we've already worked it out on our fingers: that's 268,435,456 times more RAM.
129 -- When OS X first came out, you had to pay $129 for it. That seems peculiar now, but only because Apple made it peculiar: it is because Apple moved to giving away its OS for free that people expect it, and consequently Microsoft has lost its Windows upgrade cash cow. You can well argue that this has devalued the operating system, and we wouldn't disagree an inch, but it does mean that Apple gets very high numbers of people upgrading to the new systems every year.
200 -- According to
InfoWorld magazine in 1982, 200 "man-years" had been spend on developing the failed Apple Lisa computer. Remember that this was 1982, and if Silicon Valley had heard of women, the computer press hadn't. Also remember that 1982 was two years before 1984 -- look at the quality of information we're giving you -- and so the next figure is incomplete but still revealing. That same
InfoWorld article claimed that only two man-years had been spent on the Macintosh.
429 -- Apple's then-CEO Gil Amelio paid $429m to buy NeXT in 1996. That got Apple the software that became OS X, it got Apple Steve Jobs back, and for a while Amelio thought that was all very peachy. This is a family website, so we truly can't print a comment that was made about how Jobs was going to treat Amelio to
The New Yorker by an anonymous Apple person a while later. Fortunately, we don't have to: you're already thinking the very word they used. That's not nice. Accurate and a bit vivid, but not nice.
481 -- This is a moving target, but generally speaking it's only ever moving upwards: it's the number of Apple Stores in the world. That's the brick-and-mortar type, which are in 18 countries, but then there are a total of 39 countries that have an online Apple Store.
512 -- The number of pixels horizontally across the screen of the original Mac. For comparison, today's top of the range iMac has 4,096 pixels, and they're in color.
640 -- Apple's first digital camera, the QuickTake 100 in 1994, took photos with a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels, or a total of 307,200. The iPhone 6s Plus has a resolution of around 12 million pixels.
666 -- Steve Wozniak insists that the retail price of the original Apple I computer was not some satanic reference. He says that they took the cost of building it, then added on about a third more, and ended up with 666. Reportedly Steve Jobs then made it $666.66 just for the fun of it. Incidentally, adjusted for inflation, the price today would be $2,778.07, which if you play it backwards sounds like the devil.
2,300 -- Finally. This is how much Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne made out of the company: $2,300. Actually, when he wanted to leave after 12 days, he was bought out for $800. Later, Mike Markkula had him paid $1,500: Wayne had no plans to sue Apple, and to this day says he's fine with having left, but it was a legally shrewd part of Apple becoming a corporation. You can very, very well argue that he made the best decision possible based on what was known then. At 20 years older than Jobs and 15 than Wozniak, he was the most established -- and if things went wrong financially, he was the one who'd be on the line. Only, you have to wonder. For he reports that in 2011 he sold his Apple contract to an autograph collector for $500, and that person then sold it on at auction for $1.6m.
2,495 -- This was the retail cost of the original Mac in 1984, $2,495. Its price had kept rising through the development, but this last figure was surely a contributor to the growing schism between Steve Jobs and CEO John Sculley, who would later oust him from Apple. The penultimate target price had been around $1,995, and it was Sculley who insisted on the extra $500, specifically to cover marketing costs. It's a big chunk of change to add on to a new product, and that too-high price next to the too-low amount of RAM meant Mac sales never reached the 100 million that Jobs predicted.
2,831 -- The number of days from the formation of Apple to the release of the Mac. If you're reading this on Apple's 40th birthday, then the Mac came out 11,779 days ago.
9,900 -- At $9,900, the Macintosh IIfx was still so "wicked fast" that it was bought by the truckload. Interestingly, this was a big hit when the Apple Lisa was a flop at $9,995.
20,677 -- We hesitate over this one, because it's the saddest number of the lot, unless you're Ronald Wayne looking at your $2,300 ... as it's how many days Steve Jobs lived. A sad and rather scary thought, but think of how much he did in that time.
250,000 -- This is how much Steve Wozniak paid for his six-seater Beechcraft Bonanza A36TX aircraft that he crashed in 1981. He'd bought the plane late the year before, around the time he got his pilots' license, but by the day of the crash in February he'd only logged 50 hours flying time. The crash was his fault, according to reports at the time, and it did serious damage to Woz and his then-girlfriend, later wife, Candice Clarke. Her brother and his girlfriend also had minor injuries. Woz had memory problems after this, and while he recovered, it was then that he decided to return to finish his education.
1,778,298 -- At the most recent count, this is the number of apps on the App Store.
1,591,092,250 -- Reportedly the number of computers (so including iPads and suchforth) that Apple has sold in its 40 years.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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