Apple Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Apple - Research Paper Example Apple Inc. has been established by Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne and Steve Wozniak in early 1970s when a hobby-machine that a very talented electronic wiz developed for himself and thence they thought to market it. The company has experienced full of highs and lows in its past 30 years as normally expected of a technology company and has still remained far positive despite economic, competitive and marketing challenges it faced. Apple Inc. headquartered in Cupertino, California and incorporated in January 3, 1977, is engaged in designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing of personal computers, communication devices, servers, network solutions, portable music digital players and many other related accessories and peripherals. The company markets and distributed its hardware and software solutions through its own-retail stores, online stores, sales force and third party sellers. The most unique feature of the company was that it has always been prospering on innovation. The company gained a very significant portion of the market in 1990s when it developed personal computer in the brand name Apple II, and when it reinvented the same within the next decade in the brand name Macintosh and thus ultimately to have gained a very deeply-routed brand loyalty with iMac in 1990s. iMac helped the company identify a very vast opportunity of a new market that has been until then hidden and it continually innovated many varying products and services in names of iPod, iPad, iTune, iLife, iPhone, iCloud, and so on. Apple Inc plays pivotal roles or leading shares in different industries such as Personal computer, tablet PCs, Smartphone, operating system etc. Hodgkins (2012) reported Gartner’s release about Apple’s market share in its personal computer industry. Though the report was a bad news for the industry as a whole due to that consumers are spending less on PCs as there are other technologies such as Smartphone and Tablet PCs, the news was very good for Apple that it showed an increase of its sales by 4.3 percent in the second quarter beating the shares of its competitors such as HP, Toshiba and Acer. When it comes to the market of Tablet PCs, the report was interesting that Apple’s share was nearing to its all-time high. In the second quarter of 2012, Apple shipped a total of 17 million Tablet PCs with an increase of 44.1% from the figure of 11.8 million in the first quarter. Apple holds 64.4 % of the total Tablet PCs market share where as the second leading company Samsung holds only 9.9 % of the