Apple’s Cult Status

Apple today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over five billion songs from the iTunes Store. iTunes is the number one music retailer in the US and features the largest music catalog with over eight million songs. Also, iTunes customers are now renting and purchasing over 50,000 movies every day, making iTunes the world’s most popular online movie store.

ITunes however is only part of the money making machine that is Apple. The IPod is one of the most successful portable music players of all time while their laptops and desktop computers are considered to be the state of the art while aesthetically pleasing at the same time.

Some background Information:

Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs have been friends since high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley.

Wozniak had been dabbling in computer-design for some time when, in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs -with an eye on the future- insisted that he and Wozniak try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born.

Computer did not take the Apple I very seriously, and Apple did not begin to take off until 1977, when the Apple II debuted at a local computer trade show. The first personal computer to come in a plastic case and include color graphics, the Apple II was an impressive machine. Orders for Apple machines were multiplied by several times after its introduction. And with the introduction in early '78 of the Apple Disk II, the most inexpensive, easy to use floppy drive ever (at the time), Apple sales further increased.

In 1981, things got a bit more difficult. A saturated market made