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Last month, became the first company valued at a trillion dollars. With its new, all glass and curvy lines, it looks the part of a company bestriding an industry. But its dominance wasn’t always assured. Twenty-five years ago, the computer revolution’s marquee company was in decline. Back then, it was just settling into shiny new headquarters, a campus of six buildings that formed a different kind of ring. Called Infinite Loop, the name is a reference to a well-known programming error—code that gets stuck in an endless repetition—though no one seems to know who applied it.

Infinite Loop was the place where Apple’s leaders and engineers pulled off a historic turnaround, and it will always be the source of stories and legends—many of them untold. About the Author Editor at large Steven Levy has covered Apple for more than 30 years.

Though Apple is keeping the complex, the move this year to the grounded UFO known as Apple Park seems to mark an end to the era when, every inch the hero in a Joseph Campbell narrative, rescued a company that no one wanted to die. In 1997, a young WIRED magazine, founded in the same year that Infinite Loop opened, with the Apple logo and a. Our prayers were answered—and it happened at Infinite Loop. For more than a year I’ve been interviewing Apple employees, past and present, about their recollections of Infinite Loop. In their own words, edited for clarity and concision, here is the story of a plot of land in Cupertino, California, that brought us the Mac revival, the iPod, iTunes, the, and the Steve Jobs. In the early 1990s, Apple decided to expand its Cupertino headquarters by building a new, grander campus.

Steve Jobs, who was forced out of the company in the mid-’80s, had come up with the idea. John Sculley (Apple CEO, 1983–93):. When I first started working with Steve Jobs, he had this idea of building an Apple campus. Steve called it SuperSite.

He wanted something like the experience of going to Disney World, with monorails going around, where everyone was in different-colored uniforms. When Steve told the Mac group that he wanted to have uniforms, they all looked at him like he was crazy. Acey Harper/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images Chris Espinosa (Apple employee #8, 1977–present): Then Steve left, but he’d planted in Sculley the idea that we needed a central campus on property we owned. Sculley: We had taken a contract on a former Motorola site, Four-Phase. Shaan Pruden (senior director, partnership management, 1989–present): I visited there in 1993.

I think the windows might have been in, but the insides weren’t done. I’m struck by the image of those giant windows and seeing the Caterpillars pushing around those mounds of dirt. Espinosa: It opened very late ’92, early ’93. We occupied the buildings mostly in numerical order. One, two, three, four, five, six. Greg “Joz” Joswiak (VP of product marketing, 1986–present): They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object.

Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office. Espinosa: Building 1 was occupied first by the exec staff and software group. Building 2 was all the Mac web. Three then was the development tools, technical support, and product marketing. Building four was the cafeteria and the Apple library, a great, great resource. Buildings 5 and 6 were hardware.

The notion was that all of R&D would fit in it, but by the time we finished it we’d grown too much. And then, of course, after we occupied it, the company collapsed so that we all fit in again. By ’96 we all fit into the Loop. Tony Fadell (SVP for the iPod division, 2001–10): Infinite Loop 7 was the Pepper Mill, a restaurant on North DeAnza Boulevard. It turned into BJ’s, which continued to be called IL7. People would say, “I’ll meet you in IL7,” which was the code for “Let’s go drinking.” Joswiak: The original inhabitants of all the floors got to name their own conference rooms.

It’s a very weird set of names. We have rooms like Here and There. I still have the hardest time keeping it straight. Which one’s Here, which one’s There? Scott Forstall (SVP of software, 1997–2012): Those buildings were mazes.

Every time I would bring someone on campus, they would get lost. There’s only one time I remember someone not getting lost, and it was when we were working on a screen reader for sight-challenged people.

I brought someone in who needed a seeing-eye dog. He asked to use the restroom.

Every other time this happened, I would wait because they would get lost trying to find their way back. Left, right, left, right, right.

Five minutes later his dog brings him right back into the room. That seeing-eye dog was the only one who knew his way around the very first time. When the campus opened, Apple was struggling and CEOs came and went. Scully left in 1992, succeeded by Mike Spindler, nicknamed the Diesel. He was gone soon after Infinite Loop was built, replaced by Gil Amelio in 1996.

Steve Jobs, meanwhile, was building the computer company NeXT. Ed Kashi/VII/Redux Pruden: I moved in IL3 in March ’95. It was a tough time for Apple. Every day somebody else would be leaving or they’d be having another reorg. Eddy Cue (SVP of internet software and services, 1989–present): In the early days of this campus, Apple wasn’t a highly successful company—the question was whether we would continue to exist, as opposed to whether we would be successful. Gil Amelio (CEO, 1996–97): I got handed a bucket of garbage and was working as hard as I could to get it cleaned up. Heidi Roizen (head of developer relations, 1996–97): I was hired by Mike Spindler, but I started the same day as Gil Amelio.

That was the quarter we lost $700 million. There were 350 people in developer relations. But within the first week they said, “You’re going to have to cut 20 percent of your team.” That was not what I would call a fun year.

Fred Anderson (CFO, 1996–2004): I started at Apple on April Fool’s Day, 1996. We were in the middle of a liquidity crisis, and I had to work with my finance team on a major restructuring plan and a debt offering.

I called a staff meeting. The controller and treasurer didn’t show up, and I found out later that they had tendered their resignation effective when I joined. I ended up making battlefield promotions to a treasurer and controller. Pruden: It was Friday night before the 1996 Christmas holiday, and a friend of mine called me and said, “Don’t go home today without talking to me.” Four-thirty comes around, and he says, “Oh, you might as well go. Nothing’s going to happen.” Half an hour later, he told me to get back in here. Outside of Town Hall the auditorium in IL4, I could recognize all the guys from the San Jose Mercury News—this event was meant for the press and not many Apple people were there. Our chief legal counsel goes to the podium and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here to announce that Apple Computer has acquired NeXT and I’d like to introduce Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs.” They came down the far aisle and I thought two things, “I am watching history right now” and “Oh my God!

We’re saved!” Avie Tevanian (SVP software engineering, 1997–2006): The meeting was in the evening—by the time the lawyers had drafted everything and signed everything it had gotten late, and for some reason we needed to get the announcement done. Amelio: I knew Steve would never allow a partnership, and that my days were numbered. But I did what I thought was right for the company. Jon Rubinstein (SVP hardware engineering, 1997-2006): When the NeXT deal closed, we walked into this insane asylum with Gil Amelio and his staff. Fortunately, Fred Anderson was there. But the rest of them were nuts. It was really crazy.

We started downsizing dramatically. Steve would be around occasionally in an advisory role, but he didn’t really spend much time there. Gil was not really sort of in tune with the company. Roizen: When I first arrived Gil was still up in City Center Apple’s headquarters before Infinite Loop. Gil’s floor there was like going into the inner sanctum of corporate America. Steve said the place needed an exorcist. Amelio: I didn’t like being over there when all the action was at Infinite Loop.

So I started to develop this executive suite on the fourth floor of IL1. Anderson: Gil had his lunch brought in every day on china rather than going over to our cafeteria to mix with the rank and file.

He didn’t fit the culture. Scott Manchester/Getty Images Amelio: I was absolutely not a culture fit. I ran the company in a very professional, disciplined manner. I did it for one reason: It works. The fact of the matter is that we did solve the fundamental problems. We did create a new platform.

We did fix the quality problems. Anderson: There were three board calls that I was involved in and Gil wasn’t invited to.

Ed Woolard, the board member who headed DuPont, asked, “Fred, do you agree with the strategy?” I felt I had a fiduciary responsibility to be truthful so I said, “Ed, no. I don’t, really.” He said, “You think we’re going to make the plan this year?” I said, “I don’t think so, Ed.” He said, “How’s morale?” I said, “It’s not very good, Ed.” Rubinstein: On July 4th weekend, I get a call from Fred saying, “Hey, get your ass up here right now.” Gil had been fired and Fred stepped in to the interim CEO roll. Fred was interim CEO for July, August, and part of September. And then Steve stepped into the interim CEO roll to help hire a CEO for Apple.

We interviewed a whole bunch of people, and Steve didn’t like any of them. And so he continued to do the job himself. After moving into Infinite Loop—building IL1—Jobs began transforming Apple, as a company and a culture.

With its huge atrium featuring a coffee bar to host serendipitous meetings, IL1 was the gateway to Apple. Jobs’ presence loomed on the fourth floor. Espinosa: When Steve returned, I drove down to the local Flag and Banner store, bought a pirate flag, stuck an Apple sticker on it and cable-tied it to the bridge across the atrium. It was there for about four hours before security took it down.

Dan Whisenhunt (VP, real estate, 2007–18): Steve didn’t like the campus. He wasn’t here during the time it was built, and he didn’t have ownership of the design. But the actual bones of the buildings were really good. Rubinstein: They were not great buildings. We’d kind of look out at it, and Steve would shake his head. Whisenhunt: One thing he did like was the interior courtyard. It served Apple really well.

It was private. It was beautiful. It had this collegiate campus feel. Mike Slade (special assistant to the CEO, 1999–2004): Steve didn’t use Gil’s office but had a small one. It was very, very, very cluttered with random shit people sent him. There were probably a hundred products in his office at any given time.

The couches and the coffee table were littered with crap. And then his desk was also very busy. Espinosa: One of the first things Steve did was to put giant “Think Different” banners in the huge atrium in IL1, which seemed a little propaganda-ish, but they were a hit with everybody. Then he started putting the products on the banner.

If you’re a product manager or an engineer on a team, there’s nothing more motivating than seeing your product 40 feet high on a billboard. David McNew/Getty Images Cheryl Thomas (VP software operations, 1989–present): The “Think Different” campaign was a huge, huge deal for us because it was this redefinition of who we were and how we thought. We had a big Friday beer bash, there were stacks of posters that employees could grab. People had them framed. Those same posters are in people’s offices today.

Phil Schiller (SVP worldwide marketing, 1987–present): Things were so different then—there were no cell phones, not even Wi-Fi. We didn’t get all our news on the internet yet, so the drop of magazines was a big deal to everybody. Somebody would go around with the mail cart of everybody’s magazines, and we’d get our Macworlds and MacWEEKs and look at the rumor column on the back page and say, “Uh, oh, what leaked?” The epicenter of Apple was IL1—and, in particular, Jobs’ fourth-floor boardroom. Cue: This was the central hub. People spent a tremendous amount of time in this area because of Steve’s involvement with the products. Slade: Most meetings with Steve, no matter who was meeting or what the topic, he did 75 percent of the talking.

It didn’t matter who it was, he’d just talk. Rubinstein: We’d meet every Monday. Steve would sit in the middle of the table in front of the white board—and he would spend a lot of his time up at the white board. All the major decisions were made in that meeting. One big one was moving the iPod to work on Windows. Phil and I pushed really hard on it, until Steve finally got pissed off and told us to do whatever we wanted to do, and we would be responsible. Schiller: In 1997 we made the tough decision to kill Newton.

I remember Newton customers picketing outside of Apple. Tim Cook (Apple CEO, 1998–present): My first day at work I had to cross a picket line to get in the building—they are out with signs and yelling and I’m asking myself, “What have I done?” I learned that it was because Steve decided to kill the Newton. I told him there’s protesters outside, and he says, “Oh yeah, don’t worry about that.”. Fadell: When I arrived in 2001 to lead the iPod project, it still felt like a campus that wasn’t filled.

There were all these empty offices everywhere in every building. All of the furnishings and everything had not been updated since it opened. Cook: It was an awful time. The stock crashed, it goes down by 60 to 70 percent. We get a call from Ted Waitt, founder of Gateway.

He wants to talk about acquiring Apple. Steve and I went to a meeting with Waitt and their CEO, and it’s a different Steve. Very calm, listening to the comments they made, how they’d probably keep the Apple brand. I was sitting there feeling like my organs were being cut out.

Then they said maybe they could come up with a role for Steve, and I’m thinking—he’s going to blow! He’s going to blow any minute! Then they start talking about price. And Steve looks at them—he could look at you with eyes that just penetrated your soul—and says, “Who do you think is worth more, Apple or Gateway?” The meeting lasted only two or three minutes more.

And in a few weeks they had some accounting scandal, and their stock crashed. Slade: I go into work on September 11, 2001, and it’s kind of like we’re out of business.

Meetings are canceled. Steve’s just kind of sitting around the board room with the TV on and he says, “I don’t really know if we’re going to be in business. There may be no business.” That year, Apple staffers had been working away on the iPod. Schiller: One day I went into Steve’s office and said, “Hey, all these other competitive devices make you click on buttons and go Next song, next song, next song.” If you’ve got a thousand songs, you don’t want to press it a thousand times.

We had been talking about how great the device should be if you go running, which meant you had to be able to do it one-handed. The idea came to me that we could apply the idea of a wheel to a music player. If you could rotate around continuously on a wheel, and you could have acceleration, that would be really great. Fadell: The iPod event was at 10 in the morning, it lasted for an hour, then we had a demo and some lunch. That afternoon about 2 or 3, we were kind of winding down and Steve goes, “Tony, Jony, Joz, Phil, let’s go over to the ID room,” the industrial design studio.

And he says, “So, on the next generation we need to do this, this, this, this, this, this.” Literally, we had celebrated for a nanosecond and then we were on to the next thing. But a week later, we had a nice team lunch and Steve came and said some nice things. Thomas: The first time I ever saw someone outside a lab carrying an iPod was Steve, right after the announcement. He was walking, iPod in hand, be-bopping across the quad. He had the hugest smile on his face.

As Apple regained its cultural momentum, Infinite Loop became a magnet for celebrities, musicians, political figures, and icons like Muhammed Ali. Thomas: Before Steve returned, there weren’t all kinds of interesting people walking around this campus. Over the years, what we were doing really resonated with artists and athletes and all kinds of different people. Someone would say, “Oh, Muhammad Ali’s here.” OK, cool. “Oh, Sheryl Crow’s here.” Oh, wow.

Stevie Wonder was here pretty recently. Tom Jones, that was a pretty funny one—up front there were a bunch of women, screaming. I don’t know if they were just channeling history or they were really into it.

Sarah Maxwell Schiller: One visitor was an ambassador from a country not to be named, and part of their requirements was that they put sharpshooters up on the roofs of the buildings at Apple. Guys with scoped high-power rifles up there on the roof!

I was like, “Oh my God, that is so scary.” Cue: Lady Gaga once came in to visit Steve. I don’t know exactly what she was wearing, but it looked like it was made out of, like, a Glad trash bag, and she had these huge heels and these gigantic glasses. I’m thinking, “This is going to be a disaster.” But she sat down and started talking with Steve and she had all these great ideas. In February 2001, Apple moved the industrial design studio from across the street to Infinite Loop 2. Rubinstein: I didn’t like the idea—I thought they should be further away from Steve, so it’s a little more difficult for him to drop in any time he wanted. But Steve was the CEO and so they moved it. Andy Grignon (senior manager, iPhone, 1995–2007): The original OG lockdown was Jony Ive’s lab.

The stainless steel door with a camera and the buzzing in, all this stuff. Fadell: Everything else on the campus was utterly, utterly corporate standard, and then you went in this ID room and it was like a whole different world. It was like you had entered a spaceship. Tevanian: They had these really fancy machines that could custom-make things.

They could go into their CAD program and design something and get this very fancy, expensive machine to produce a prototype. They had the famous wood tables that you see in the Apple Store.

Every nine months there was something new. As the Jobs regime solidified, he became the center of the daily routine at Infinite Loop. Schiller: Steve would say, “Let’s not have a meeting sitting in a chair, let’s get up and walk.” The campus is Infinite Loop—it’s a circle—and Steve would take you for a walk around it rather than be cooped up in an office.

We’d do laps. When people talk about walking to close your rings on the Apple Watch, I always think back to that. Whisenhunt: He had very predictable paths. The first was from the parking lot through the lobby up to his office. The second path was over to Jony’s studio. That was an indoor route that was known very well. There was one place along the path where I would put things where I knew he’d see them—I would mock up various carpets or floor coverings so he could get a sense of them.

Then I could talk to him later and say, “Well, hey, did you like that? Did you like what was down there or not?” Espinosa: All of the big launch and intro activities were rehearsed in IL3. In the two weeks before a product was intro’d, it would be just crazy with Steve coming in and sitting and watching the keynote demos over and over and over again and refining them.

I remember one group was going to introduce this feature of Mac OS10. Steve basically tore it apart—it didn’t make sense, he didn’t understand why anybody would use it, the demo was terrible. Right there, a week before introduction, he killed the product and it never surfaced again. Schiller: My team would create and develop all the keynote demos. When we were working on the demo for the first iBook with AirPort WiFi, the original idea was we would have an iBook with an accelerometer strapped to a giant doll. So we took a four-foot doll, and had someone up on the roof with this doll on a bungee cord.

Steve said, 'That's great—but it can't be a doll, it has to be a person—and Phil, it has to be you. If you do it, you’ll go down in the demo hall of fame!' I said, 'One condition, I won't sign any waiver.

If I get maimed or killed my family can sue Apple for everything you're worth.' Grignon: I give my notice, and I get a call from Steve’s admin to meet, and we just have this fucked up chat. It gets personal, it gets all sorts of weird. This is a keep-me chat, right? And the first words out of his mouth were, “You fucked up Bluetooth on the phone.” Lynn Fox (director of PR, 2006-2008): I took a job heading communications at Palm, which Steve had a thing about.

I had been prepped by other ex-Apple people there about what to expect when I quit. So I cleaned out my office because I knew I was going to be walked out.

Sure enough, when I told my boss Katie Cotton, she said, “You’re betraying us.” And she walked me out. Fifteen minutes later, my phone was disconnected. Rubinstein: I left in 2006.

A year later, Palm asked me to be executive chairman, and I agreed. And I gave Steve a head’s up. You know Steve, he was either “You’re on my side or you’re the enemy.” I was voted off the island. I have never been back since. Fadell: I quit three times. I remember packing my office after the first time, three or four months after the iPod shipped.

I had set up a party in my house and was driving home when I get a call to come back. Steve and Jon worked out with me the terms I needed. I got back in the car with all my stuff in it, drove home and said, “Guys!

This is just a party!” They’re like, you’re not leaving? No, not anymore. When I did leave Steve announced that I was going to be leaving, and I got real nice claps and high fives from the senior executives. And I’ve never been back. In 2003, Jobs got sick. Slade: I can probably count on my fingers the number of times Steve came in my office.

One time he came in my office and he shut the door, and said, “I need to talk to you about something really important.” I said, “What?” And he tells me how he and Laurene were having a big argument about cheese—he didn’t think his kids should eat it but Laurene thought it’s a source of protein. I said, “Steve, you might be right, but I think this is an argument that if you win, you lose. Don’t you just let her make the call?” The next time he comes in my office is the fall of 2003. He says, “I need to tell you something—I have pancreatic cancer, I’m dying.” And he’s crying, and I’m crying, and it’s awful. So, that was Monday.

Tevanian: Instead of having our normal meeting, he told everybody to come over to the side of the room, instead of by the whiteboard where he would always sit. So it wasn’t just everyone sitting around the board room and him saying “I’m sick.” Slade: On Tuesday, he comes in my office again and he says, “No, he’s going to be all right.” My future father-in-law was a general surgeon and he did tons and tons of pancreas surgeries. He did this thing called a Whipple. But Steve told me he wasn’t doing that. He had reasons why.

I explained it to my father-in-law and he said, “That makes no sense, I’ve never heard of that.” A year later, Jobs took a brief leave for surgery. For a while, he seemed to recover but then went into a slide, took another leave for a liver transplant, and then continued working during a painful decline. Fadell: There were times you could definitely see it, I don’t want to get into what happened, it’s just too personal. And he would walk out of the room when something happened. We would all just sit there, and we didn’t know what to say. We just looked at each and we were just, fuck! No matter what he said, or no matter what happened, it didn’t feel right.

Dag Kittlaus (director of Siri, 2008-11): We were going in that boardroom and meeting with him every three, every two weeks, seeing him progressively weakened. And I remember walking in, I met him in the hallway. He could barely walk. This was like June or July 2011. And I said, Steve, “How are you doing?

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He looked at me and he said, “Dag, I just need a new body.” Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. Cook: I felt I was filling in for a period of time and Steve would come back. I was always good with that, and that’s how I wanted it to be. I thought that until literally 48 hours before he passed away. Shan: It was the only day in probably my 20 years at the campus that I wasn’t there, because that day a shooting happened up at the rock quarry in Cupertino. There were police helicopters everywhere and the guy was still at large, so I was home in the morning. The news started circulating.

I go to Apple.com and there was the tribute picture on the front page, and I just lost it. I just had to go back to the office. It sounds morbid, but I wanted to be there with people who knew him. But by the time I got there, everyone had gone home.

It was a ghost town, which was even more bizarre. Thomas: That day, as I walked out the main front doors there was this amazing sky, but in the foreground were flags set at half-staff.

That image of those flags lowered is something I’ll never forget. And over the next few days, thousands of people were coming, and there was this makeshift memorial to him on the lawn right outside of IL6. Whisinant: We had three or four days to set up. We’re good at doing stages, but the unique part was creating the landscape and the atmosphere for the event. We brought in sod to create more areas for people to stand and sit in. We brought in lots of beautiful trees and plants to give more serenity and greenery to the space. It was almost like a church for that morning.

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Schiller: The Steve Memorial Service was probably the most emotional thing I’ve ever worked on. We all wanted to make sure it was the greatest thing we ever worked on, from the entertainment to the giant images of Steve that we selected. We wanted Coldplay to come, but at first it didn’t fit their schedule.

They were supposed be on a late-night show on the East Coast, but finally the band said, “Wait a minute. When friends call to ask for help with something, you drop everything, and you just do it, and Apple’s our friend.” Pruden: I couldn’t sleep the night before so I thought I’d just come and get in line—at about 3:20 am. I was at the front, and when I entered I saw the whole thing in all of its glory with nobody in the Quad. They had those beautiful pictures up on the buildings, and they had a lovely buffet breakfast set out for us. There were white orchids everywhere and his favorite playlist was on the sound system.

Very touching tributes from Bill Campbell and Al Gore and of course Tim and Jony. They played Steve’s voiceover for the Think Different advertisements and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Late last year people started moving out of Infinite Loop for the new Apple Park campus. Joswiak: This has been the epicenter of Apple for the last couple of decades and it’s gone pretty well.

At the same time, there was excitement over creating something new. One of the things that Steve wanted or taught us is to not be nostalgic. Whisenhunt: For a set of 25-year-old buildings, I think they still look pretty good.

Schiller: The basic bones of the buildings and structures are the same, but there were big changes over the years. We added more, more, more, more people. The parking has gotten so much more challenging. The offices have two or three people to them.

But the biggest change has been the diversity of the people. You see more young people than we ever had. You walk around and you’re hearing probably every foreign language being spoken around this campus.

You didn’t hear that 20 years ago. Kittlaus: Walking around Infinite Loop, the thing I noticed was everyone was good at what they do, and they generally were in the right spots. That place oozes with competence. I had never been in a company that’s spent 95 percent of its time thinking about the product. I used to work at Motorola and when I met with the top guys, it was always about how we’re going to win the Vodafone accounts. But sitting in with Steve and Scott and the team, we would sit in a room all the time, for hours, deciding whether certain settings belonged on the top level or whether they should have been the second level on iOS.

Cue: At the end of the day, I don’t think the campus mattered, honestly. It’s the people who make the products. Would it have worked somewhere else? Now does leaving bring back really great memories?

Sometimes it brings some sad memories. Cook: We locked up Steve’s office. I would not have moved into his office, and no one has. I decided early on it didn’t feel right to change that office at all.

There are some personal things he had in there that are now with Laurene. But it’s the same desk and chair, credenza, bookcase. As a matter of fact, there’s still drawings on the whiteboard that his daughter did. Last summer she came by, and I showed her the stuff that she had drawn.

You can still feel him in there, because I saw him in there so much. Some people go to the grave site to reflect on someone. I don’t do it frequently, but I go to his office. Forstall: Soon after Apple bought land for the new campus, Steve and I walked around the property to get a feel for it. I expected Steve to be happy. But he was melancholy.

He explained why as we passed a deserted building on the property and saw an old Hewlett-Packard sign. Apple had purchased the land from HP, which had been one of the most storied companies in the history of Silicon Valley, started by two legendary founders. Steve looked at the building. “Eventually everything comes to an end,” he said. We looked at each other for a few moments, then walked on. Many participants held different roles at Apple over the years.

The titles included here are the ones that seemed most relevant. Updated 9-17-18, 2 pm EDT: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the name of the former Motorola site.

Updated 9-20-18, 2:30 pm EDT: An earlier version of this story used an outdated title for Tony Fadell.

Key Facts Name Apple Inc. Unique ability to design and develop proprietary hardware, software, applications and services Apple Inc.’s ability to design and develop its own hardware, software, applications and services allows the company to introduce unique, innovative and easy-to-use products and solutions for its customers. Unique, innovative and easy-to-use products and services that integrate seamlessly into one Apple ecosystem are the reasons why customers buy Apple’s premium products and enjoy using them.

In other words, it creates a competitive advantage no other company can match. Apple’s product ecosystem Source: Strategic Management Insight Apple’s ecosystem is the result of the company’s ability to proprietary hardware, software, applications and services.

Many of Apple’s competitors have tried and still try to imitate the success of Apple’s product ecosystem, but fail due to not having strong capabilities in designing, manufacturing and developing both hardware and software, applications and services., Apple’s strongest competitor, lacks a comprehensive OS and has very few apps and services to offer its customers., Apple’s second largest competitor is very strong on software, application software and services, but has only developed a few unsuccessful hardware products. Except for Google and Samsung Electronics, no other company could seriously attempt to challenge Apple’s. Powerful brand supported by strong advertising and marketing capabilities Apple is the world’s most valuable and recognizable brand. According to Interbrand 2 and Forbes 3, the Apple brand is worth US$184.154 billion and US$170 billion, respectively. Brand value is closely related to its recognition, meaning that Apple is also one of the world’s most recognizable brands.

Their brand recognition is supported by its vast product ecosystem. Moreover, Apple has a reputation of developing highly innovative, well designed, and well-functioning products, as well as for delivering a great customer experience and sound financial performance. The company has been able to achieve such strong brand recognition and reputation through its strong advertising and marketing capabilities. Apple’s excellence in creating spectacular marketing campaigns, its superior advertising capabilities, premium quality products and ability to deliver an excellent customer experience has allowed the company to build the most powerful brand in the world. Access the full analysis.

More Apple strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Show/Hide sources. Apple, Inc.

Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended September 30, 2017. Available at: downloads/AAPL/x 819 -7FB6-4710-B4A5-7ABFA14C F5E6/10-K20169.24.2016 -asfiled.pdf Accessed May 12, 2018. Interbrand (2018).

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