HOW APPLE GOT ITS NAME

Even Apple’s name is not run-of-the-mill. Consider some of the other giants of computing; some take the name of their founders (Hewlett-Packard or Dell); others choose names that leave you in no doubt as to the sector in which they operate (Microsoft or IBM – an acronym for International Business Machines). Apple, though, sounds nothing like your standard high-tech company. So how did it come about?

Jobs and Woz were scrabbling around for a suitable moniker ahead of the release of what became Apple I in 1976. It was selected while Wozniak was giving Jobs a lift in his car one day. A few ideas were being thrown around, mostly with a more traditional computer-y ring to them. Had things worked out differently, we may have had the Matrix Electronics iPod or the Executek iPad. But the two company founders decided none of these alternatives was quite up to the task.

Jobs, meanwhile, was deep into his fruitarian lifestyle and was just returning from one of his occasional stays at the All One Farm, his old college friend Robert Friedland’s apple farm a little way from Portland. No doubt with apples firmly at the forefront of his mind, Jobs threw it in as a suggestion. It was, he argued, fun and unintimidating, and suggestive of spirit. Others have subsequently pointed out that it also got them into the phonebook ahead of Jobs’ former employee, Atari!

Wozniak immediately put up a warning flag: what of the Beatles’ Apple company? But try as they might to alight on something better, nothing seemed to fit quite as well. It was, in many ways, a stroke of genius. At one level, the apple is a symbol of nature, purity, goodness. In Biblical terms, it is, at least in the popular imagination, the fruit of knowledge. Then there is the association with intellectual pursuits, not least Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. Indeed, the original Apple logo was an ornate depiction of Newton sitting beneath an apple tree waiting for inspiration to strike. The company ultimately decided to settle on an image of an apple with a bite taken out of it, a fun pictorial play on the ‘byte’ of computer memory.

Besides its multi-layered meanings, the adoption of the Apple name set the company apart from its rivals from the beginning. This was a business that approached things in a different way, a business that was … not Executek. However, as it turned out, Woz’s concerns about conflict with the Beatles were well placed, for the surviving members of the great band would go on to sue the company. As a result, in 1981 Apple Computer agreed to keep out of the music business.

But by the end of that decade, issues over the use of Apple machines in music production saw a new legal spat that cost Apple Computer over $25 million in legal settlement. When the iTunes store opened in 2003, another battle became inevitable but was finally resolved in 2007 with an agreement on use of trademarks. It was not until 2010, however, that the Beatles’ music at last became available on iTunes. For a conflict that ran for years, cost millions and caused a lot of anguish, it is difficult to believe that either Apple did much damage to the other’s business outside of the courtroom.