Image via Flickr/ Peter Alfred Hess

Apple is one of the most iconic and most talked-about brands in the world, but there’s still plenty we don’t know about the company. From the original logo to last year’s sales numbers, here are 50 facts you probably didn’t know about Apple:

1. Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2013. That works out to 255 sold every single minute.
2. Apple also sold an average of 106 iPads and 35 Macs every minute in 2013’s fourth quarter.
3. It made $283,000 per minute.
4. Ronald Wayne is the largely unknown third cofounder of Apple, alongside Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. He sold his 10 percent stake in the company for a measly $800. By 2011, that stake would have been worth $35 billion.
5. Jobs and Wozniak sold their belongings to raise $1,300 to fund the first Apple prototype. Wozniak sold his scientific calculator for $500, and Jobs sold is Volkswagen van for an additional $800.
6. The first prototype became the Apple I, went on sale in 1976 for $666.66. Wozniak didn’t want to round up to $667 because he preferred repeating digits.
7. Apple employee Jef Raskin came up with the Macintosh name because it was his favorite type of apple. It was meant to be a temporary codename, but it stuck.
8. Jobs tried to change the codename to “Bicycle,” stating that computers were like “bicycles for the mind.”
9. Other Apple codenames throughout the years have included “Peter Pan,” “Piltdown Man,” “Spartacus” and “Mackelangelo.”
10. The original Apple logo, designed by Wayne, featured Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree with an apple about to hit his head.
11. Apple now has 80,000 employees worldwide, with full-time employees in every U.S. state.
12. Still, it only has stores in 44 states. Apple has a total of 250 U.S. stores.
13. Employees at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. headquarters earn $125,000 per year on average.
14. Apple is the largest single employer in Cupertino, accounting for 40 percent of the city’s workers.
15. Everything you say to Siri is sent to Apple and stored for up to two years.
16. Apple created a gaming console in 1995 called Pippin. It was unsuccessful, and the company discontinued it in 1997.
17. It also created the first publicly available digital camera, called the QuickTake 100. Released in 1994, it could take up to 32 photos.
18. The iPad’s coveted Retina display is manufactured by rival company Samsung.
19. Smoking near your Mac could void the warranty.
20. Apple spent $1 billion on advertising in 2012, up from just $338 million in 2006. Microsoft spends significantly more. In 2012, it spent $1.6 billion on advertising.
21. Apple spent $4.5 billion on research and development in 2013. That’s nearly double the $2.4 billion it spent just two years earlier. For comparison, Microsoft spent $10.6 billion on research and development in 2012.
22. When Apple hit hard times in 1997, Bill Gates and Microsoft invested $150 million in the rival company to help save it.
23. Tim Cook earned $376 million the first year he was Apple CEO, making him the highest paid CEO in the world in 2011.
24. Cook made a more modest $144 million in 2013, making him the sixth-highest paid CEO.
25. Cook wakes up before 4 a.m. every day. He receives 700 to 800 emails per day from customers and reads most of them.
26. Apple designer Susan Kare created a picture of a dog/cow hybrid to show a paper’s orientation in a printer. Named Clarus by employees, the dogcow soon became a sort of mascot. She makes the sound, “Moof!”
27. The “iPod” name was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the famous line, “Open the pod bay door, Hal.”
28. The “iPad” name is rumored to be inspired by the PADD, a similar fictional device used on Star Trek.
29. The last product Steve Jobs ever publicly launched was the iCloud.
30. Yo-Yo Ma, Bono and Joan Baez all performed at Jobs’s 2011 memorial service.
31. Baez and Jobs dated in the 1980s.
32. Jobs sold Bono his apartment in the early 2000s.
33. Jobs is buried in an unmarked grave in Palo Alto, Calif.
34. Apple had more cash on hand in 2011 than the U.S. Treasury.
35. The iPhone alone was worth more in 2012 than all of Microsoft combined.
36. Apple is rumored to give employees fake projects to work on in order to find out if the employees will leak information. Employees within Apple say the rumor is false.
37. The App Store brought in $10 billion in sales in 2013.
38. Apple owned the rights to 4,649 patents as of 2012. This is a drop in the bucket compared to other tech companies. Microsoft held 19,800 at the time, and Samsung, the tech company with the most patents, had a whopping 47,855.
39. Apple engineers codenamed a computer “Carl Sagan” in 1994, hoping “billions and billions” would sell, a reference to one of the astronomer’s books. Sagan sent a cease and desist, and Apple changed the codename to BHA, short for “butt-headed astronomer.” Sagan sued for libel and lost, as the judge noted that “one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase ‘butt-head.’” Sagan sued again, lost again and appealed. Apple and Sagan settled their dispute in 1995.
40. Apple has also had big legal battles with the Department of Justice, Samsung, New York City, the Blogosphere, Cisco and The Beatles.
41. Fake Apple stores in China were found using the brand and logo without permission. The 22 stores were so convincing that the employees believed they were actually working for Apple.
42. The nine-person executive leadership team at Apple received a combined $441 million in 2011. That’s more than the earnings 95,000 Apple factory workers combined.
43. Steve Jobs eliminated all corporate charity initiatives in 1997.
44. Apple is ranked the world’s most valuable brand, with an estimated worth of $104.3 billion. Microsoft is #2 on the list but doesn’t even come close, with a worth of $56.7 billion.
45. The cube-shaped flagship store in midtown Manhattan is one of the most photographed landmarks in the world.
46. Apple’s current logo was created by Rob Janoff.
47. One of the earliest Apple slogans was “Byte into an Apple.”
48. Apple Inc. was officially Apple Computer until Jan. 2007.
49. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has been on Apple’s Board of Directors since 2003.
50. The first two retail stores opened in 2001 in California and Virginia.
51. Apple began developing a tablet before it even started working on the iPhone, but the iPad wasn’t released until three years after the iPhone.
52. When IMB debuted its first PC, Apple placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal reading, “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.”

Katherine Pilnick

Katherine Pilnick primarily writes about money for Wall Street Insanity. She’s previously written for sites including Forbes, The Washington Post and Business Insider.

More Posts