This Week in Apple History by Owen Linzmayer & Bryan Chaffin

July 10 - 17: The Executive Shuffle, Profits, Jaguar Introduced Published October 28th, 2004

This week (July 10-11) in 1981, Apple saw the departure of its first president, Michael "Scotty" Scott. Mr. Scott had been brought in from outside Apple in 19977 to help bring some corporate credibility and direction for the fast growing company. In 1981, however, investors were not happy with Mr. Scott because of some setbacks at Apple.

In 1992, another outsider was brought into Apple. Gaston Bastiaens was recruited from Phillips Electronics to head Apple's new Personal Interactive Division, which included the Newton. That means, of course, that he wasn't to last long at Apple, and sure enough, he was out a year after the Newton shipped.

Being the second week of a new quarter, the July 10-17 week in Apple history tends to be one for reporting financial results. In 1999, for instance, the company reported a massive profit of US$ 203 million, though much of that came from the sale of stock holdings the company owned. We have other year's highlights below.

The most important thing that happened this week in Apple history, at least when looking through a contemporary lens, was the release of Jaguar, Mac OS X 10.2. Apple unleashed this version of its flagship operating system, the first to be publicly marketed under its cat-based code name, in 2002. Jaguar really brought Mac OS X to the forefront of the computing industry, and was a big success for the company.

You can find more information on many of the entries below in Owen Linzmayer's excellent Apple Confidential 2.0. The other entries can be found in TMO's archives, and we link to articles whenever we can.

July 11-17

1981: Apple's first president, Michael "Scotty" Scott, resigns after four and a half years of helping establish the company's infrastructure and guiding the firm through an enormously successful initial public offering. Scott's fate was sealed after the unpopular "Black Wednesday" firing of 40 employees and termination of several unproductive hardware projects in the wake of the disappointing Apple III.

1992: Belgian-born Gaston Bastiaens is named VP and general manager of Apple's newly formed Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) division, which included the Newton project. Bastiaens came to Apple from Philips Electronics in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where he had been director of the Consumer Electronics Division and general manager of the Interactive Media Systems Group, helping launch the Philips CD-Interactive player. Bastiaens left Apple less than a year after the Newton MessagePad finally shipped. In 2001 he was arrested for securities violations during his tenure as CEO and president of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products.

1999: Blowing away analysts' estimates, Apple posts a profit of US$203 million for its seventh consecutive profitable quarter. Almost half the income comes from the sale of 10 million shares of ARM Holdings plc., which Apple had acquired in conjunction with its development of the Newton. Apple sold almost a million Macs (representing unit growth of 40%), spurred in large part due to demand for the iMac, which accounted for more than half of all units sold in the quarter.

2001: After taking a pounding for the last couple of quarters, largely for the failure of the Power Mac G4 Cube and the dwindling interest in the CRT-based iMac, Apple manages to post a US$61 million profit for the past quarter.

"We had a great education quarter, with significant year over year growth, and a great iBook quarter, shipping over 182,000 of our new wildly popular consumer and education notebooks," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Perhaps the most strategic event of the quarter was the launching of Apple Retail Stores, with the very successful openings of our first two stores, and plans to open 23 more in 2001."

2002: At the Macworld Expo in New York City, Apple announces a slew of new products, including Mac OS X 10.2 ("Jaguar"), a 17-inch flat screen iMac, the .Mac online service (formerly called iTools), iTunes 3.0, and a new generation of iPods featuring the industry's first solid-state touch wheel. Most significantly, the new iPods are available for the first time to both Mac and Windows customers.

2003: Apple announces financial results for its fiscal 2003 third quarter ended June 28, 2003. For the quarter, the Company posts a net profit of US$19 million, compared to a net profit of US$32 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenues for the quarter were up 8 percent from the year-ago quarter and up 5 percent sequentially, and gross margins were 27.7 percent, up from 27.4 percent in the year-ago quarter. Apple shipped 771,000 Macintosh units during the quarter. "This was a great new product quarter for Apple, starting with the iTunes Music Store and the new third-generation iPods, and ending with the announcement of the Power Mac G5 and the developer preview of Panther, the fourth major release of Mac OS X," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.

is the author of Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, published by No Starch Press earlier this year (US$13.97 - Amazon).

is the editor of The Mac Observer, and was egged on, in-part, in his obsession with the Mac by Owen's first book, The Mac Bathroom Reader.

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