Apple, like other historical names in computer science (comes to think of Microsoftbut also a Hewlett Packard e IBM, to name a few of the best known), is a company that not only has a longer history than one might suspect, but can also count on a much wider presence and connections of various kinds, not only commercial: Steve Jobs, the co-founder loved Italy and was in private capacity several times on vacation in our country. As a design enthusiast he knew the history and philosophy of Olivetti well and according to legend he had also visited the Olivetti shop, commissioned in 1958 by Adriano under the arcades of Piazza San Marco in Venice and designed by the architect Carlo Scarpa.
And even in the darkest moments in his history, like when he was kicked out of Apple in 1985, he found consolation by traveling to Italy. On the contrary: he was right remembering the walks in Florence in the mid-eighties, when he walked the sidewalks that have an unmistakable blue-gray due to the stone used, that Jobs decided that all the Stores should have the flooring of that color. It was for this reason that at the beginning of the 2000s he sent his emissaries to Firenzuola to buy tens of thousands of original pietra serena tiles.
But Apple’s relationship with our country is not just made up of private visits Jobs and the other co-founder, Steve Wozniakwho also came to Italy as a guest of the community of enthusiasts of the company, organized since the nineties in the Amug, the Apple Macintosh User Group, one of which created in Savona the private museum All About Apple. In reality there is much more.
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Apple fans
The role of enthusiasts in our country has been fundamental from the very beginning: the first importer of Apple products was a passionate, the owner of Iret Informatica who had discovered almost by chance the existence of this young Californian company founded in 1976 by two young startuppers (Jobs and Wozniak, in fact) and had decided to import the first Apple II, the personal computers produced starting from 1977 and up to all 1992 with the Apple IIgs (while the later Apple III was not a success).
Meanwhile, the company from California had grown, had started working on more ambitious products: the Lisa and then the Macintosh, born in 1984 but on which the works had already begun at the end of 1979. It is also for this reason that Apple, with a view to international expansion, decided not to renew the contract with Iret and to open the Italian branch in May 1982.
The Macintosh arrives in Italy
If the first Cupertino products officially sold in our country were the Apple II, the company soon began to offer the Macintosh, officially born in 1982 and still today marketed in numerous variants. A revolutionary computer not only for the box shape and the graphical interface (at the time competitors such as the MS-Dos used black screens with lines of text to issue orders to the system), but also for a series of software that have changed the history of the world of publishing and audio and video production.
The Macintosh played a pivotal initial role in initiating the transformation of entire industries. From publishing to television, from record production to cinema and advertising, there hasn’t been an industry that hasn’t seen Apple computers pop up in offices and newsrooms, editing rooms and recording studios.
The digital transformation of the arts
The large and small Italian publishing groups have experienced the transformation initiated by Apple with what has been called the desktop publishing and the digital typography. Today we take it for granted, but in the second half of the Eighties it radically changed the work in newspapers, periodicals and publishing houses, creating new skills and requiring the requalification of many of the existing ones.
From laser printing to the use of software such as PageMaker, XPress e Indesignformats such as Adobe’s PostScript and technologies for visualization, but also for image manipulation, such as Photoshop: they all originated on the Macintosh and then, little by little, they also passed on to competing platforms.
Like publishing, advertising, television and discography have also seen the advent of digital editing thanks to software (such as Avid) originally born on Mac. It was an important transformation that accelerated production times and reduced costs in a period of great opening up to sector competition in the Italian television, radio and publishing market.
Love for design
Since the late 1980s, Apple in Italy has contributed to the transformation of entire creative sectors, while also carving out a significant role in the school sector (in schools, but also in universities) up to the scientific research of our laboratories of excellence and to engineering and architecture: structural design software such as AutoCad were originally born on Mac, and compatibility with Macintosh was a requirement for a long time. for the creation of research machinery in physics, biology and chemistry laboratories.
However, love for design was one of the first bonds that ideally united our country at the top of Cupertino. It can be read in the official biographywho already in 1981, participating in the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, which had Italian design as its theme, had said: “I came to pay homage to Italian designers as the protagonist of All American Boys pays tribute to Italian cyclists. This trip was an extraordinary source of inspiration “.
Italy has become an important country not only for Jobs: the British designer Jony Ive, for a long time at the head of Apple’s style and the true artist behind the company’s products, did not never hidden the love for our country, and in 2015 he chose Milan Design Week, for example, for the world premiere of the Apple Watch. Thus recognizing a unique role for our country at the same time in the fashion sector and in that of design and watchmaking. And the design was crucial not just for computers and phones, but for iPods, digital pocket jukeboxes that have just recently retired after 21 years.
A love, that for the made in Italy design, definitely reciprocated: also the ADI, the Italian Association of Industrial Design, which created the Compasso D’Oroin 2014 awarded him to the career of Apple, considering it “a company that has used design as a fundamental component in the creation of products and services that have revolutionized our way of life”.
Love for Italy
Not even Tim Cook, who has often come to Italy on an official visit, does not hide his admiration for our country: “Apple feels at home here – he said in 2015 in a speech at Bocconi University – How could it not be so? In Italy there are many places, many people, many companies, where there is a passion for great design and craftsmanship. The attention to detail of a craftsman “.
According to Cook, “throughout history your country has demonstrated the great value of design. A design that exists at the intersection between technology and liberal artsthe intersection of form, function and aspiration “.
Design, understood as Jobs understood it (“it’s not how something is made, but how it works”), is also one of the recognized components of developers Italians. In the awarding of the developer awards, a sort of corporate Academy Award divided into various categories, it is common to find Italian names: in 2017 there were two Italian developers who had won Apple’s Design Award with their Bear and AirMail. But there are hundreds of others.
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The Italian Academy
The ecosystem created by Apple, both with physical stores and with the app economy that underlies the software Store, has created an ecosystem that in our country it is worth 85 thousand jobs and a network of developers that according to Christopher Moser, Apple senior director of the App Store in Europe, is spread more or less evenly throughout our country.
Apple, which in 2007 opened the first Italian Store in the RomaEst shopping center (today there are 17), wanted a particular role for Naples, where it opened in 2016 (in collaboration with the Federico II University) its first European Developer Academy, that is, the school where aspiring programmers can learn how to develop apps for their devices.
Since the opening of the Academy of Naples, almost 2 thousand graduate students have cultivated skills of programming, design and marketing, that is, everything that is necessary not only for software development but also to start your own business. In addition, another 3 thousand students attended the introductory Foundation courses, lasting 30 days, which Apple has created in our country in collaboration with various universities and non-profit organizations. THE corsi Foundation are a lighter introduction, designed for students who want to acquire more programming skills on the Cupertino platform.
Since Apple’s International Conference of Developers’ Student School opened, that is the Wwdc (that of 2022 will be held in the USA in a few days)the Italian students who won it (most of whom came from the Academy) were among the largest groups to participate in the event organized in Cupertino or remotely, significantly increasing the Italian share.