Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc. on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving on October 15, 1993.

[4] His stint at Apple remains controversial due to his departure from Jobs's sales structure, particularly regarding Sculley's decision to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers.

[5] Others say that the "two clashed over management styles and priorities, Jobs focusing on future innovation and Sculley more on current product lines and profitability".

[16] Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at a bottling plant in Pittsburgh.

As a result of the research, Pepsi decided to launch new, larger, and more varied packages of their soft drinks,[17]: 43–44  including the two-liter bottle Sculley worked with DuPont to develop.

[17]: 54 In 1974, Sculley became president of PepsiCo's International Food Operations division,[16] shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris.

To make the food division profitable, Sculley improved product quality, enhanced accounts, and established financial controls.

The Pepsi Challenge included a series of television advertisements that first aired in the early 1970s, featuring lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers participating in blind taste tests.

[21] Steve Jobs successfully sealed the deal after he made his pitch to Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?

Sculley, with his solid business background and recent success, would give Apple an image of greater reliability and stability.

When Jobs's Macintosh, the first of a new series of models with a pioneering black-and-white graphical user interface, was shipped to stores in January 1984, Sculley raised the initial price to $2,495 from the originally planned $1,995, allocating the additional money to hypothetically higher profit margins and to expensive advertising campaigns.

[26] The Apple board of directors instructed Sculley to "contain" Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products.

[31] Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator were eventually fulfilled by the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s and others by Apple itself with the introduction of Siri.

[32] On December 5, 1992, Sculley, as chairman, CEO, and CTO of Apple Computer, Inc., gave a seminal speech regarding the future of the Internet, titled "The Dawn of a $3.5 Trillion Communications Mega-Industry: Information Access, Processing and Distribution in a Digital World."

[33] After a bad first quarter in 1993, amid a personal-computer price war and internal tension over the company's direction, Apple's board forced Sculley out.

[37] After leaving Apple on October 23, 1993, Sculley became chairman and chief executive officer at Spectrum Information Technologies, a New York-based company that held key computer patents for wireless data transmission.

Sculley alleged that he was misled when he was hired at Spectrum by not being told of SEC inquiries and "aggressive revenue recognition accounting" for license fees.

[44] In 1997, Sculley became the chairman of Live Picture, a California-based company, to oversee its push into high-quality, low-bandwidth imaging over the Internet.

Months later, Lynch left the company, while Sculley continued to consult and work with small businesses, including InPhonic, whose board of directors he later joined.

[51] In 2004, Sculley joined the board of directors at OpenPeak, a maker of software for wireless consumer electronics, digital media, computers, and home systems.

[53] In March 2006, Sculley was named Chairman of IdenTrust (formerly Digital Signature Trust Company) a San Francisco-based firm focusing on verifying identity and boosting financial security.

[55] Sculley had canceled Apple's first hand-held mobile tablet PenMac led by Paul Mercer with applications by Samir Arora and instead signed an agreement to work with Sharp Electronics on the Newton technology.

[56][57] Also in 2003, Sculley was interviewed by the BBC for the television documentary The World's Most Powerful episode Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates, discussing his time at Apple during the 1980s as CEO.

[60] On January 30, 2014, Sculley was a panelist at a forum organized by Zeta, which featured ad executives, marketers and NFL executive to discuss the changes in the way companies market and reach consumers since Sculley's time at Apple in 1984 when the computer company featured what became one of the first iconic Super Bowl ads—the 1984 commercial.

[64] He has also been working in the health care industry, focusing on RxAdvance, a cloud-based platform that helps pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and insurers manage chronically ill patients living at home.

[67] In 2013, Sculley married Diane Gibbs Poli, vice president and design coordinator for Wittman Building Corporation, and they live in Palm Beach, Florida.

The owner said: “He told me that since they were retired from the frontlines of business, they could have enjoyed sushi at Steve’s favorite restaurant and had a good time together, but he has passed away and now he’s in heaven.”[70]