My Geography Project- Apple Inc.

                How Apple Inc. Started

•Apple was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.  The Apple I was sold as a motherboard less than what is today considered a complete personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66 

•Apple was incorporated January 3, 1977 without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Multi-millionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple.

•The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with character cell based colour graphics and an open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.

•The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world—the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II—compatibility with the office. According to Brian Bagnall, Apple exaggerated its sales figures and was a distant third place to Commodore and Tandy until VisiCalc came along.

•By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The company introduced the ill-fated Apple III in May 1980 in an attempt to compete with IBM and Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market.

•Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface , and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa.

•When Apple went public, it generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly created more millionaires  than any company in history.






                             Apple, from beginning to now.

First Apple Computer

      

     

         

         












Apple computer in 2001

    Apple computer in 2005

         

         

                   

        

Apple computer in 2009

           

          

               Apple Laptop

Iphone 3 ( first Iphone )

        

                       

Iphone 3G

Iphone 4

Iphone 4S

Ipad

                                    






















             
















                     How many Iphones were sold from 2007-2011?      


   

•When one of the newest products from Apple “ Iphone” came out , their launch week was the most important thing, because it would give the Apple team an estimate on how popular the Iphone’s were going to be.

•China Unicom said they it signed up 5,000 iPhone subscribers in the first four days it was available. This gave Apple a shock because they then realised that the new branch of technology that they introduced to the public was going huge worldwide.

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•Apple sold more than 5 million iPhones in 2007. Their goal was 10 million by the end of 2008.

A graph that shows how many Iphone's were sold between 2007-2011

Steve Jobs (Creator of Apple Inc.)

Apple and Child Labor 

•Apple Inc released on Friday an audit of its major suppliers, saying it found a number of violations including breaches in pay, benefits and environmental practices in plants in China.

•The Cupertino, California-based company, notorious for keeping its supply chain a secret, also for the first time released a list of its major suppliers.

•The company said it conducted 229 audits last year, representing an 80 percent increase over 2010.

•Apple said it probed all levels of its supply chain, including final assembly and component suppliers.

•The consumer device giant will grant access to an independent auditing team from the Fair Labor Association in an effort to overcome criticism regarding working conditions at factories in its supply chain.

•"It's a level of transparency and independent oversight that is unmatched in our industry," Apple said in the audit report.

•Apple said it found 6 active and 13 historical cases of underage labor at some component suppliers but said it did not find any underage workers at its final assembly suppliers.

•The report titled "Supplier responsibility progress report" also said it asked suppliers to repay workers after it found 67 facilities had docked worker pay as a disciplinary measure.

•Apple also terminated business with one supplier and was correcting the practices of another supplier. Both were repeat offenders, the report said.

                             

                               Article about Apple and Child Labor

Apple said that 91 children under the age of 16 were discovered to be working last year in ten Chinese factories owned by its suppliers.

By comparison, in 2009, Apple said eleven underage workers had been discovered.

“In recent years, Chinese factories have increasingly turned to labour agencies and vocational schools to meet their workforce demands,” said Apple’s report.

“We learned that some of these recruitment sources may provide false IDs that misrepresent young people’s ages, posing challenges for factory management,” it added.

In response, Apple said it had “intensified” its search for workers under 16, the minimum legal working age in China. In one factory it had found 42 children working on the production line and has now terminated its contract. Apple said it decided that the management “had chosen to overlook the issue and was not committed to addressing the problem.”

In other cases, Apple said it had been “aggressive” in returning children to their families and had forced factories to cover the costs of education for the underage workers for six months, or until they reached 16, “whichever is longer”.

Apple is the only major technology company to audit its supply chain and publish the results. Of the suppliers that Apple visited last year “more than 40pc stated that Apple was the first company ever to have audited their facility for social responsibility compliance,” it said.

However, it does not name individual suppliers, which makes it impossible for outside scrutiny of the firms involved. By contrast, Dell and HP both publish lists of who they buy their components from.

For 2010, Apple’s Supplier Responsibility report reveals a patchy record.

On the one hand, Apple has succeeded in auditing more of its factories than ever before, a total of 127, compared with 102 in 2009. On the other, a smaller share of those factories are meeting Apple’s guidelines in some key areas.

While the situation overall is broadly improving, or at least not deteriorating, less than a third of Apple’s suppliers are now meeting its requirements on working hours. Last year, 46pc were compliant and the year before, 59pc.

That means that two-thirds of the factories which supply components for Apple’s range of products, or who assemble them, make their workers toil for more than 60 hours a week and do not give their workers one day of rest per seven working days.

“Seventy-six facilities had records that indicated workers had exceeded weekly working-hour limits more than 50pc of the time,” Apple said.

Likewise, fewer factories (72pc) are now compliant with health and safety standards and only 57pc of factories are compliant with codes to prevent workplace injury. Apple’s audits uncovered 37 “core” violations in 2010, up from 17 in 2009.

This year, however, Apple did display some teeth in dealing with its suppliers, firing three of them. Aside from the company employing child labour, one other was fired for trying to bribe Apple’s auditors and a third had repeatedly falsified its payroll records and lied about it to Apple.

Apple has come under fire in China as a “sweatshop brand” which has “based its mass production on subcontractors, without proper protections in the workplace”. A report compiled by 36 environmental groups, led by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and Friends of Nature, said at least 200 Chinese have been sickened by working for Apple’s suppliers.

The NGOs conducted a nine-month study of working conditions at seven Apple subcontractors across several Chinese provinces, gathering damning statements from workers on the production line

Apple also said it was “disturbed and deeply saddened” by the spate of suicides at Foxconn, one of its most important suppliers. The company sent Tim Cook, its chief operating officer, to Shenzhen in the wake of the suicides and commissioned an independent review of more than 1,000 workers.

It said it had asked Foxconn to provide more counselors and that the Taiwanese firm had started to move factories inland so that workers would be “closer to their home provinces”. It said it would continue to work with Foxconn.

It also admitted that 137 workers at Wintek, another supplier, had been poisoned by n-hexane, a chemical used to clean the screens of iPods and iPhones. Apple said it had asked Wintek to cease using the chemical.

Apple Inc. & child labor