The Known (and Less-Known) Facts About Steve Jobs and his Apple

Tens of movies and documentaries are made on the life of Steve Jobs. And not to forget the best-selling biography on this revolutionaire, penned by equally legendary Walter Isaacson. Today, not only do we know about Apple’s products and services, the majority of us is also well acquainted with the see-saw story of this company since inception—something that greatly helped shape this brand as reliable, innovative and elegant.

The Known Story

Three people get together and start a company. One of them is alpha. The company grows. But for some reason, the alpha gets ousted. And the company gets into financial trouble over the course. The alpha starts working in another company, which eventually gets bought by his original company. The alpha returns as CEO. Takes over his original, now-drowning company, and takes it to new heights, ultimately making it the world’s most trusted and valuable brand.

This is a simple story of Apple. The alpha here is Steve Jobs. The original company, of course, is Apple. And the second company is Pixar, whose Steve Jobs was CEO of until 2005, when Disney Purchased this computer animation company at a whopping $7.4 billion price.

However, even with a lot of things in the public forum now, beyond the veil of ‘been there, done that’ information, there’s a lot to Apple and its co-founders that people don’t know about. Some are quirky facts, others are circumstantial events—all, in one way or other, contributing to immortalize this brand.

The Unknown One

Did you know Steve Jobs was half Syrian? He admitted it in his biography, saying his biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, migrated from Syria to Wisconsin, where he met his biological mother, Joanne Scheible. Does this not paint a totally different picture of Syria that we know today?

We have all heard of the rocky relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—the two co-founders. On February 1985, Wozniak allegedly left the company in frustration. However, this is a wrong information usually tossed by many websites. In reality, even till this day, in 2018, he remains an employee at the Apple. And although he doesn’t work there and not even pay a visit, the company pays him a stipend of $120,000 every year.

Steve Jobs last words were “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” In her eulogy on the New York Times, his sister Mona Simpson write, “His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.”

Apple is known to be a perfectionist from every angle. So, it comes as no surprise that the company spends just as much time and attention on the packaging of the product as the product itself. In its California headquarter, it has a secret packaging room where tens of dedicated designers work on every aspect of the package of Apple products—right from getting the arrows correct to picking the right color in order to get the right emotions from the buyers. Detail-oriented—this is perhaps what’s required to build a multi-billion-dollar company.

Apple is very secretive about its products, new launches, and innovative features. The company actually creates fake projects for its employees and different departments; so, no one exactly knows what’s coming in the announcements and launches. And whoever tries to make any leak, the people on the top would easily come to know who that person was.

The first Apple logo featured Isaac Newton, sitting under a tree with an apple about to hit his head. The logo was designed by the third co-founder of the company, Ronald Wayne. Thank god, while as fitting as that logo looked with the brand name, the company got rid of that. And now we have a much sleeker, memorable and iconic Apple icon.

The name – iPhone – that we know today wasn’t the first choice of makers. Back then, the team considered the names like Telepod, Mobi, and Tripod. They even thought of naming the Smartphone “iPad”. It was only after a long time and lots of thinking did they finally settled for the term ‘iPhone’. Imagine, was it named Telepod—how weird would have that sounded.

Do you think Apple and Samsung are competitors? Well, yes, on the surface there are. However, here’s a fact that many people don’t know. Samsung actually manufacturers the retina display and memory chips that Apple uses in its products. Although the company is working hard to become less reliant on Samsung (they are “competitors” after all), its products are really incomplete with the manufacturing and tech might of Samsung. So, if you own an iPhone or iPad and are tempted to take a dig on Samsung phones, you might not want to do that!

Aside from these, there are plenty of other amazing and less-known facts about the tech behemoth that is Apple. Hundreds of people worked to help the company get its start in the early days. Thousands work now to ensure it enjoys its high fight. So, it’s quite natural that there are countless facts and experiences hidden beneath this brand. And the thrill to wait for another such scoop surfacing on the scene through some movies, documentaries or books is too much.

Prreeti Radhika Taneja

| Posted on May 29, 2018

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