$1 Trillion: A Remarkable Milestone For Tech Industry

Over the past several months, Apple has been on the brink of becoming the first technology company in the world to reach a trillion-dollar market capitalization - a feat many thought would be impossible.

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Now, after Apple announced stronger-thanexpected earnings, the company has topped $1 trillion for the first time, overtaking its rivals in Samsung, Alphabeat, Microsoft, and Amazon to the crown. Today, we look back at how Apple got there, and predict the tech giant’s next moves.

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Apple may now be a trillion-dollar company with a string of successful product lines, but that wasn’t always the case. In the late 1970s, three men, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mike Markkula, came together to design and market the Apple II series of computers. The result? The first line of commercially successful personal computers, which lead to the Apple Lisa computer, and just a year later, the Apple Macintosh - a device that catapulted Apple into success.

By 1985, Steve Jobs decided to leave the company, to launch NeXT, a tech company that specialized in higher education and business. Jobs then took a major interest in Lucasfilm, which became Pixar, and served as an executive producer on Toy Story. The rest is history.

Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 after Apple acquired the NeXT company that Jobs owned, and he served as a permanent CEO until 2011. During his tenure at Apple, he helped to transform Apple from a niche computer platform into a global company, introducing the iPod in 2001, a product that changed the way we played and shared music. Within just a couple of years, the iPod was the product that everybody wanted to own and by 2007, Jobs and his team had taken what consumers loved about iPod, and turned it into the iPhone, reinventing mobile overnight.

By 2010,