How did what is now the world’s most valuable company come to be named after a fruit? According to Apple’s cofounder, the late Steve Jobs—as related to Walter Isaacson in his 2011 biography—“he [Jobs] said he was ‘on one of my fruitarian diets.’ He said he had just come back from an apple farm, and thought the name sounded ‘fun, spirited and not intimidating.’”113
This was in Cupertino, California, in April 1976, when the young Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak released what they called the Apple I computer. Rumor has it that Jobs also admired the music company the Beatles had set up—Apple Corps, founded in 1968 in London—and that he considered apples a beautiful fruit for a logo (the original Apple I manual also featured an illustration of Isaac Newton reading underneath an apple tree—an intellectual precedent for the kind of innovation Apple hoped to embody).
Some eight years later, fruit were in mind once again when Apple was in the process of releasing its prototype home computer for nonexpert consumers. The project had been started in the late 1970s by Apple employee and interface expert Jeff Raskin, who originally wanted to name it after his favorite variety of apple, the McIntosh Red: a green and red fruit originating from trees cultivated in the early nineteenth century by a Scottish-Canadian farmer named John McIntosh (the original tree, planted around 1800, survived until 1910, and its site is marked today with a headstone).
The name “McIntosh,” however, proved too close to an existing brand of audio equipment, and so the spelling was changed to “Macintosh.” Finally released in 1984, the Apple Mac—as it soon became affectionately known—revolutionized the home computing industry, as well as initiating a series of computers that has continued to be developed and produced to this day.
In the twenty-first century, Apple has perhaps become best known—linguistically at least—for its use of the prefix i to denote its products. This began just before the millennium, with the 1998 release of the “iMac,” the first major new product produced by the company after Steve Jobs’s return as CEO in 1997 after an absence of a dozen years.
With the subsequent triumphs of iPods, iPhones, iTunes, and iPads, that i has become an international badge of computing cool. Yet if Jobs had gone with his first choice of name, all this would have been very different. As Apple’s advertising creative director Ken Segall tells the story, Jobs unveiled the firm’s new computer internally under the provisional name the “MacMan” and claimed to hate the name “iMac” when it was presented to him as an alternative. Fortunately for all involved, Segall insisted on presenting exactly the same name to him again a week later; and this time, deciding he no longer actively hated it, Jobs allowed the iMac to be born.114