The Man Who Sold Apple for $800: The Astonishing Story of the World’s Most Valuable Company

From an April Fools’ Day garage to a four-trillion-dollar empire, how Apple fell, rose, and changed the world forever.

The incredible story of Apple, from three founders in a 1976 garage and the man who sold his share for $800, to near-bankruptcy, the iPhone, and a four-trillion-dollar empire. Shop genuine Apple iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks at ValueHub Kenya.

Table of Contents

1. The $800 Mistake
2. A Garage and a $666 Computer
3. “1984” and the Macintosh
4. The Fall
5. Think Different: The Return
6. The Reinventions That Changed the World
7. A New Era
8. Why Apple’s Story Matters
9. Own a Piece of the Legend in Kenya

The $800 Mistake

On 1 April 1976, April Fools’ Day, three men signed the papers to start a company called Apple Computer. Two of them are now household names: Steve Jobs, a 21-year-old visionary, and Steve Wozniak, a brilliant 26-year-old engineer. The third was Ronald Wayne, an older, experienced hand brought in to keep the two young founders grounded. Wayne was given a 10 percent stake in the new company.

Just twelve days later, nervous about the risk, Wayne sold that stake back to Jobs and Wozniak for 800 dollars. It may be the most expensive decision in business history; that same share today would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It is the perfect opening to Apple’s story, because Apple has always been a company where the bold are rewarded and the cautious are left wondering what might have been.

A Garage and a $666 Computer

The legend says Apple was born in a garage at Steve Jobs’s family home in California, and while Wozniak later joked the garage part is a little exaggerated, the humble beginnings are very real. To fund their dream, Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his prized calculator, scraping together just enough to build their first product.

That product was the Apple I, a computer Wozniak designed and built by hand, sold as a bare circuit board for the curious price of 666 dollars and 66 cents. A local shop ordered fifty, and Apple was in business. The name itself was pure Jobs: he wanted something fun, friendly, and unintimidating, and it had the bonus of landing ahead of Atari in the phone book. With crucial early funding and business wisdom from investor Mike Markkula, Apple was incorporated in 1977, and then came the machine that changed everything: the Apple II. With colour graphics and a friendly design, it became one of the first computers ordinary people actually wanted, sales rocketed from under a million dollars to over a hundred million in just three years, and in 1980 Apple went public to instant riches.

“1984” and the Macintosh

Apple’s next leap came from an idea Steve Jobs saw at a research lab: a screen you could navigate with a pointer device called a mouse, instead of typing cryptic commands. He was determined to bring it to everyone. The result, in 1984, was the Macintosh, the computer that popularised the friendly, click-and-point interface we all use today.

Its launch was as bold as the product. A single, cinematic television advert, directed by Ridley Scott and aired during the Super Bowl, cast Apple as the rebel freeing the world from grey conformity. It only aired once nationally, yet it became one of the most famous commercials ever made, and it made Apple a household name overnight.

The Fall

Then came the hard years. In 1985, after a bitter power struggle with the very CEO he had recruited, Steve Jobs was forced out of the company he founded. He left to start other ventures, and without his fierce vision, Apple gradually lost its way. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, cheaper computers running Microsoft’s Windows captured the market, Apple’s products grew confusing and unfocused, and the company bled money. By 1996, many experts were writing Apple’s obituary. The rebel had run out of road.

Think Different: The Return

In 1997, with Apple close to collapse, the company made a desperate move that turned out to be a masterstroke: it bought Steve Jobs’s new company and brought him back. Jobs returned, ruthlessly simplified Apple’s messy product line, and even accepted a lifeline investment from rival Microsoft to keep the lights on. He relaunched the brand with a now-legendary slogan that was also a statement of intent: Think Different.

The turnaround announced itself in 1998 with the iMac, a friendly, colourful, all-in-one computer that looked like nothing else on the market. Apple was alive again, and it was about to do something far bigger than make computers.

The Reinventions That Changed the World

What followed was one of the greatest runs in business history. In 2001, Apple released the iPod and reinvented how the world listened to music, a thousand songs in your pocket. Then, in 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage and unveiled the iPhone, a phone, an iPod, and an internet device in one sheet of glass. It did not just launch a product; it created the smartphone era and reshaped daily life for billions of people. To reflect how far it had travelled beyond computers, the company dropped the word “Computer” from its name to become simply Apple Inc. The iPad followed in 2010, and a new ecosystem of devices, apps, and services began to lock together with a seamlessness no rival could match.

A New Era

In 2011, a gravely ill Steve Jobs handed the reins to his trusted operations chief, Tim Cook, and passed away that October, mourned around the world. Many wondered if Apple’s magic had died with him. Instead, under Cook’s steady leadership, Apple grew into the most valuable company on Earth. It added the Apple Watch and AirPods, built a massive services business, and in 2020 began designing its own powerful “Apple Silicon” chips. In 2018 it became the first US company worth a trillion dollars, and it has since soared past two, three, and around four trillion dollars in value, with more than two and a half billion Apple devices now in active use worldwide. Today Apple is pushing into artificial intelligence and spatial computing, and in a sign of a new chapter, Tim Cook is set to hand over to a new CEO in late 2026. The garage startup has become a global institution.

Why Apple’s Story Matters

Apple’s journey, from an April Fools’ garage and an 800-dollar mistake, through near-death and back to the summit of the business world, is one of the most dramatic stories in all of technology. It is a tale of vision, of daring to be different, of the power of great design and relentless simplicity, and of the magic that happens when beautiful hardware, software, and services work as one. It is also why Apple products inspire such loyalty and trust: every iPhone, iPad, and Mac carries decades of obsessive craftsmanship. When you buy an Apple device, you are buying into one of the defining stories of our age.

Own a Piece of the Legend in Kenya

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