Apple Technologies is a highly successful corporation that has consumed many of its smaller rivals over the years, with its biggest buyout of all time being its hostile takeover of long-term rival Microsoft after a decades-long struggle. While Apple Technologies still doesn't hold the market share on hardware production, their design influence is still strongly felt throughout the marketplace, and many corpdrones and ravegirls are seen with Apple products locked to their ears and eyes. They also exclusively use their own operating systems on machines they have developed, making 'Apple-compatible' a requirement of any technology that needs to work with theirs. This has not met with the fantastic success Apple expected; even after subsuming its greatest long-term competitor, competing operating system standards have propagated and flourished on everything from uplinks to satellites.
Apple Technologies is held up as a symbol as everything the disaffected hate about modern society. Their products are pretty but expensive and overpriced, their technology is ubiquitous but vulnerable, their software is secure but almost guaranteed to have backdoors, and their attitude is of superiority but lacks innovation. Apple products tend to lag behind in terms of functionality, and most of the software people think of as 'hacker'-like doesn't even bother for Apple compatibility.
Apple products create a paradoxical problem for corporate IT specialists; on the one hand, most corporations find themselves required to adopt 'Apple-compatible' as a core computing philosophy to ensure that all systems work together, and on the other, Apple is known to include backdoors for technicians in all products, which makes securing them completely a nigh-impossibility. In addition, Apple-compatible products work great with each other, but work poorly with everything else. Apple also actively pursues and attempts to retain claim to a variety of software patents in an attempt to restrict competition. No IT manager worth their paycheck will endorse Apple solutions, but no corpdrone with money to burn will pass up their products (or refrain from complaining when they don't work with everything.)
Apple sells a broad line of electronics and computing solutions, mostly designed for ergonomics over function, as well as various software utilities.