Apple began in 1976, in a house in Los Altos, California, when Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne put their names to a company built around a single circuit board. Jobs and Wozniak incorporated it the following January. Fifty years later the founding habit is still the one that explains most of what Apple does: design the hardware and the software together, and the two fit in a way neither would on its own.
Most people meet Apple through the iPhone. Around it sits a family that now takes in iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple TV, HomePod and Apple Vision Pro, all of them built to work with each other rather than merely alongside.
The Mac has been through a complete change of engine. Every model runs on Apple silicon, the processors Apple designs itself, and the range covers the MacBook Neo, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro for people working away from a desk, and the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Studio for people at one. The Mac Pro was retired in March 2026, and the Mac Studio took its place at the top of the desktop line.
Services have become a business in their own right rather than an accessory to the hardware. The App Store, iCloud+, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+, Apple Pay, Apple Card and AppleCare One all sit under that heading, and Apple One bundles several of them into one subscription.
Beats, acquired in 2014, still runs under its own name with its own headphones, earbuds and speakers.
Apple is headquartered at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, which opened to staff in April 2017, and employs more than 150,000 people.
Who owns Apple? Nobody controls it. Apple is a public company whose shares trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol AAPL, and its largest shareholders are fund managers investing on behalf of millions of savers rather than individual people. Vanguard Capital Management, for example, reported owning 7.48% of Apple's shares as of 31 March 2026 in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
What does Apple own? The iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple TV and HomePod, Apple Vision and the services business are Apple's own creations. Beats is different: Apple bought it in 2014 and kept it running under its own name. Each of those has its own page on Brandligo.
