The Untold Origins: What Apple Never Put in the Press Release

everyone thinks they know the apple story two steve's in a garage building the future on a shoestring budget but almost nothing about that picture is quite right you know last week we talked about that moment blockbuster laughed netflix out of the room a single catastrophic miscalculation right apple has one of those too but it happened on day 12 and it involved a founder nobody ever talks about okay wait a third founder i thought it was just jobs and wozniak it was for about twelve days his name was ronald wayne he was brought in as a sort of adult supervision and he drew the first apple logo he held a 10% stake in the company 10%

of apple i can't even imagine what that's worth well he can he sold it back to jobs and wozniak for $800 he was worried about the financial risk $800 wow so from the very beginning the story we're told is edited what else is missing the garage for instance how real was that mostly symbolic steve wozniak himself has clarified this no real design no prototyping no manufacturing happened in that garage it was a place to make phone calls the real story behind the first big order is actually much grittier go on they got an order for 50 computers from a local store the bite shop but they didn't have the parts or the

money for the parts so jobs basically used the purchase order to get a line of credit the first apple computers weren't built on a dream they were built on a promise to a single shop owner so the garage is a myth and one of the founders cashed out for less than the price of an iphone the next part of the legend is the brilliant visionary steve jobs and the engineering genius steve wozniak taking on the world and that part also leaves someone absolutely critical out mike morcula the investor more than that he was the one who wrote the first business plan he secured proper funding jobs and wozniak raised about $1,300 by selling a vw

van and a calculator marcula invested depending on the source somewhere around $91,000 maybe up to a 250,000 he turned it from a hobby into a company and that's what gets us to the apple two the machine that actually put them on the map exactly but even the apple two success had a secret partner a piece of software called visicalc it was the first ever spreadsheet program suddenly this computer wasn't just for hobbyists it was a serious business tool that's what drove sales through the roof so it wasn't just the hardware the machine needed a purpose and another company gave it one it's a pattern with apple you know the story always focuses on the beautiful

object but it often leaves out the crucial partner or the lucky break that made it work the official history tends to jump from the success of the apple two right to the macintosh in 1984 but that's not what happened there's a dark period in between oh a very dark period they launched the apple three and the lisa both were commercial disasters they were expensive they were notoriously unreliable and they tarnished the brand and this is where the infighting really starts the tension between steve jobs and the ceo he personally recruited john scully the guy he famously asked do you wanna sell sugared water for the rest of your life that's the one and in 1985 that tension

boiled over the board sided with scully and steve jobs was pushed out of his own company it's incredible he's gone and what happens to apple then it wanders for a decade the product line becomes a mess of confusing models market share plummets from 20% down to under three by 1997 the company had lost over $1,000,000,000 they were months from bankruptcy so the famous return of steve jobs in 1997 it wasn't a triumphant comeback it was a desperate last ditch effort to save a company that was actively circling the drain it was fundamentally an acquisition apple bought the company jobs had started in exile next mostly to get him and his software back in the building

it was the only card they had left to play when you put it all together the story isn't two friends in a garage who changed the world it's a story of a founder who got scared a forgotten executive who wrote the playbook a series of catastrophic failures and an exile that almost became permanent right the myth is about effortless genius the truth is about near death experiences it's a story of survival not just invention and maybe that's why the garage story is the one that sticks it's just so much cleaner mhmm it's a better press release but it's not the story of what actually happened