Before Steve Jobs became one of the driving forces behind the personal computer revolution, he held the mundane job as a summer worker at an apple farm. The job left him with the belief that apples were the perfect fruit. Add to this the fact that he loved the simplicity and style of the Beatles’ Apple record label, coming to the decision of naming his new computer company “Apple Computers” was a natural.
Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak struggled over the name and finally decided that if no brainstorming session could come up with a better name, Apple it would be. You know the rest of that story and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer, Inc. was born. The next item on the agenda was then to come up with a logo.
The pair’s first design incorporated an image of Sir Isaac Newton along with a tree and a simple banner that read “Apple Computer.” Steve Jobs wasn’t happy with the result, thinking it was too busy and didn’t send a strong enough message. With the challenges that a personal computer company faced in the early days of the computer revolution, a strong and simple brand was needed. The logo was simplified to show just an apple – similar to what the company still uses today. But it still didn’t satisfy Jobs and Wozniak. It wasn’t until the pair took a bite out of the apple that the logo stuck. The same simple logo is still being used today.
Apple Computer Inc. was incorporated in the state of California on January 3, 1977. Apple’s initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market happened on December 12, 1980. They went public at a rate of $22.50 per share. The stock has split three times since the IPO so on a split-adjusted basis the IPO share price was $2.75. Apple common shares are traded on The NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol AAPL, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol APCD. At the time of this writing, Apple Computer Inc.’s common stock was trading on the NASDAQ at $129.06.
In October of 2008, Apple researched its carbon footprint and provided their personal computer users with estimates of the total greenhouse gas emissions generated by every new product sold. Manufacturing and using the MacBook, which is currently the company’s most popular notebook, results in 460 kg of CO2e emissions over four years of consumer use. According to calculations from the Environmental Protection Agency, that’s roughly the same amount the average car emits in just a month of driving.