From the design team’s obsession with unboxing to satanic pricing and the world’s most unlikely mullet, there is more to Apple than meets the eye
The company behind the ubiquitous iPhone and iPad is famously secretive, but there a few little known facts about the California-based company.
1 Steve Jobs was adopted and half Syrian
Apple’s legendary co-founder and chief executive died in October 2011, but while heading up the company Steve Jobs revealed that he was actually adopted and half Syrian. His biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali met as 23-year-old students at the University of Wisconsin.
Jobs was put up for adoption in 1955, through pressure from Schieble’s parents. Schieble and Jandali later married and had a daughter, Jobs’ biological sister.
2 Apple’s first computer was satanically priced
Apple’s first computer, the Apple I, was priced at $666.66. Steve Wozniak apparently priced it without realising that the triple-six configuration had Satanic connotations, instead pricing it at one-third over the wholesale price of $500, and preferring one repeating digit over 667 because it was “easier to type”.
3 Apple ships everything by air, not sea Who is The prince of The Power of Air ? 
Apple is Cathay Pacific’s biggest freight customer, as it prefers to move most of its stock by air instead of boat. The benefit is being able to move stock quickly rather than cheaply, with stock moved from China to the US in 15 hours instead of 30 days. It means that less money is tied up in stock (normally on credit) before it can be sold on.
It also means that phones, tablets and computers all worth in excess of £500 each are not sitting in a container at sea which might sink or get hijacked.
4 A Macintosh is an apple variety
The Apple Macintosh is so called because the macintosh was Jef Raskin’s favourite variety of Apple.
At the time it was just a codename, which Steve Jobs reportedly tried to change to “bicycle” while Raskin was out of the office, but Macintosh stuck until the end of product development and made it onto the box.
5 Apple’s hero shots aren’t computer generated
The big, glossy super-high-resolution photos of Apple’s latest products in adverts and on its site are not computer generated. Instead, they are a painstaking blend of hundreds of high resolution, super-close up photos all with narrow depths of field.
The individual images are stitched together, in a similar way to high dynamic range photography which blends photos with different exposures, into one massive, ultra-high-resolution image entirely in focus.
6 Steve Wozniak is still an Apple employee
Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak set up the company in 1976 with Steve Jobs in his garage. He no longer actively works for Apple, but is still officially an Apple employee and receives a stipend estimated to be worth $120,000 a year.
7 Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow
Steve Jobs’ last words were “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow” while looking over the shoulders of his family, according to his sister Mona Simpson, who allowed the eulogy she gave at Jobs‘ memorial service to be published in the New York Times.
8 Apple had three founders
Apple was founded in 1976 by three people, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.
Ronald drew the first Apple logo, wrote the original partnership agreement and the Apple I computer manual, but sold his 10% stake two weeks in for just $800 because of concerns over debt.
That same stake would have been worth over $35bn today.
9 Thank Ive for the white iPod
Steve Jobs was opposed to the idea of white products initially, but was convinced to use white as Apple’s primary colour for its products by Apple’s designer Sir Jony Ive.
In Ive’s recent biography, former Apple designer Doug Satzger has said that Jobs was only won over by white when shown a different shade called “moon grey”.
Ive’s love for white originated long before he joined Apple, right back to the work he produced while still a design student at Newcastle.
10 Packaging obsession
Apple pays as much attention to its packaging as it does to its products. So much so, that it has a dedicated secret packaging room within its headquarters in Cupertino, California.
Packaging designers spend countless hours opening boxes within this special room, attempting to elicit the correct emotional response in customers opening new products for the first time. In his book, Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky describes the level of obsession and attention to detail Apple commits to packaging:
“One after another, the designer created and tested an endless series of arrows, colours, and tapes for a tiny tab designed to show the consumer where to pull back the invisible, full-bleed sticker adhered to the top of the clear iPod box. Getting it just right was this particular designer’s obsession.”
11 Balls
In his recent unauthorised biography of Jony Ive, author Leander Kahney included a photo of an iMac G4 inside its box. The stem connecting the screen to the domed base is encased in polystyrene, with the two ball-shaped speakers carefully and very deliberately placed either side of the shaft. The idea of arranging them to look like male genitals was apparently the idea of the design team.
For good measure, the book also features a high school photo of Ive, arguably the world’s most famous designer and tastemaker, with a very impressive mullet.
Apple’s legal team is in dispute with The Church of Satan But The Church of Satan Explained How They are Apple’s REAL Church !
The church’s webmaster is an avid Mac fan and had created parodies of Apple’s Think Different advertising campaign, featuring cult leader Anton Szandor LaVey. The site also featured Apple’s familiar Made with Macintosh Web badges and Apple logos, claims MacEvangelist.
The images were maintained on the cult’s site for two years. Apple, fearing the negative connotations of having its brand identity connected to the Church of Satan, forced it to cease using them.
Not devil may care Apple’s legal firm, Arent Fox, insisted the images be removed, on the grounds of trademark infringement. Its statement read: “Apple believes that your use of the Made With Macintosh and Think Different badges in this manner is likely to tarnish the goodwill associated with the Apple trademark.”
The Church contends that its Web site was built on a Mac, and that the cult’s webmaster was proud of this. It also believes that Apple’s ‘Think Different’ slogan is close to its own beliefs, arguing that the company’s decision to force the Church to remove the images is tantamount to a suppression of belief.
Cult webmaster Peter Gilmore said: “View with fresh perspective the company which introduced its Macintosh using a lengthy commercial dramatizing an athletic young woman smashing the grey visage of an Orwellian dictator on a video screen. She burst through the ragged, shuffling hordes, a vision of Satanic splendor, and refused to submit to conformity.
“If we were making this again today, the face on the screen could be that of Steve Jobs, and Apple’s lawyers might be huddling amongst the masses, only moving away from the crowd to stick out a foot in an attempt to trip the heroine on her dash towards the promotion of independent thought.”
Evil logo Gilmore added spookily: “It is also amusing to us that this company uses as a corporate logo an apple with a bite taken from it, which certainly appears to be a reference to that other famous apple. We have not forgotten that forbidden fruit, which would impart knowledge of Good and Evil, offered to Eve in that mythical garden by none other than the serpent, an avatar of Satan himself. Is it not then strange that they seem to fear the admiration of the Church of Satan? As Anton LaVey himself would have said, ‘They want to dance, but their feet won’t let them’ .”
HOW IPHONES ARE MADE DID YOU KNOW ALMOST BY SLAVES !
They wake you in the middle of the night, give you tea and a biscuit, and then you start your 12-hour shift.
That was the detail that struck me most from a New York Times article about why Apple can’t make products in the United States.
In 2007, when Apple made a last-minute change to the original iPhone, workers in China had to scramble to meet a tight deadline, according to an unnamed former Apple executive who spoke to the Times:
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” [the executive] said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
The question is: should there be? Would we accept the idea of a plant where people are packed into barracks and can be roused in the middle of the night, given a biscuit, and sent to work for 12 hours? Where workers have no right to complain?
We would not accept this in the United States because, quite simply, it’s barbaric.
Not “breathtaking.” Barbaric.
But we go along with it happening in China, and have turned a blind eye to it, because we want our gadgets and we don’t want to pay fair prices for them.
The Times story estimates that making iPhones in the U.S. would add $65 to the cost of each unit—a cost that Apple, which makes huge profit margins, could easily absorb. But as the article points out, the real issue isn’t the low cost of labor—it’s that “speed and flexibility.” (A great euphemism.)
To its credit, Apple recently joined the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit that advocates for better working conditions around the world. Earlier this month, in a letter to Apple employees, CEO Tim Cook said Apple had just completed its annual review of supplier factories and found that things are getting better. Apple has helped improve living conditions for workers and even offers free education to some of them. “We insist that our manufacturing partners follow Apple’s strict code of conduct,” Cook wrote. And: “No one in our industry is driving improvements for workers the way Apple is today.”
Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones in China, provided a statement to the Times saying that its workers are covered by a “clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights.”
But what rights do they actually have? Last fall, I participated in a panel discussion with Mike Daisey, who does the one-man show called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
Daisey describes appalling conditions inside the factory in Shenzhen where iPhones are made. (Apple disputes some of Daisey’s claims.) The larger issue, he says, is not the factories but the government of China. His argument is that China is a fascist country run by thugs who have created the kind of exploitative environment that Western companies have long craved but could not get in the West.
It’s their dream, Daisey says—a country where hundreds of thousands of people can be herded into “worker cities,” stacked like cord wood in overcrowded dorms, and forced to work long shifts in cruel conditions. (No bathroom breaks, no talking, and you stand up the whole time.)
And the fascist government—Daisey leans on the word fascist, making sure you get the implied comparison—assures Western companies that they can do business there and will not have to worry about unions or labor unrest. If workers try to form a union, they can be sent to prison.
Why are we doing business with this kind of regime? Why are we making this bargain?
As the Times article points out, this isn’t just Apple. It’s every company. It’s every product we use. It’s our entire way of life, built on the backs of people who are being treated in ways that we would not allow ourselves or our countrymen to be treated.
Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies—but with us, the consumers.
And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change.
So what if building that smartphone in China means we save 65 bucks and get things done faster? Maybe we would be better off paying a little more and waiting a little bit longer.
This week, Apple will report its financial results for the holiday quarter. It’s probably going to be another huge blowout, with Apple doing about $40 billion in revenues and keeping $10 billion of that as bottom-line profit—an incredible profit margin for a company that makes hardware.
Wall Street will be ecstatic. The stock will soar. But it’s worth keeping in mind how Apple did it.