By bighughhef
Apple is an American based company located in Cupertino just outside of San Jose in California. The company is a multinational technology company and it is considered to be one of, if not the biggest tech-company in the world. Apple is well known for their design on MacBook’s, iPhone, iPads and iPods.
As a design organization the company falls under the industrial design category. When the company first was established, Apples main focus was to create different and more creative types of computers than IBM and Microsoft did at the time. The first computers they made was with colour graphics and open architecture which means that you could add, swap and upgrade software easily. The design of their products wasn´t a primary focus at that time. That changed in the late 1990´s when Apple decided to restructure the company´s product line and rebuild the brand to the brand we know today.
With the introduction of the new Macintosh computers with a unique design along with the iPod and iPhone, Apple revolutionized the portable media industry as well the smartphone industry with the introduction of a mobile phone that you also could listen to music with. It was something the world had never seen before and Apple took great market shares from being the first in that segment. The design was clean, minimalistic and simple and it quickly became very trendy at the time.
The logo itself is easy to recognize with just an apple that has been taken a bite off, but there is no additional writing or any other additional signs that says that the product is from Apple.
Apples main competitors varies from the different segments witch the company operates in, but Samsung, Huawei and Microsoft are the main competitors when we look at the industrial design. Over the years, many companies have tried to copy their design and Samsung has even been ruled to pay apple 539 million USD in a design patent dispute that lasted almost a decade with an official end in 2018.
In today´s market, Apple still remains the biggest company within their market segment, but their competitors are “catching them up” and in 2019 the company reported the first decline in profit and revenue for the first time in a decade which can indicate that the company perhaps has stagnated a bit and struggles to keep their market share that they have today.
It will be exciting to see what they can do in the future and I am certain that Apple still can come up with something new that the world has never seen before.
Making sense of art and design industries 