Why is Apple called Apple?

1976 was a good year. Rocky was the top grossing film, The Concorde began flight, Viking II landed on Mars, The Muppet Show premiered, I was born and Apple was named Apple.

Then, magically in 2011 there I was eating a Mars bar like a muppet, having a conversation with a friend about how Apple came to be named Apple? There are so many stories and all of them make sense, so I decided to carry out a little research. Like Magnum PI this would require me going into my past. And although my past is not as traumatic as a Veitnam Veteran, I have always been fighting for a cause of a different kind. The consumer driven war of productization and this was a little battle I could get to the bottom of with some hard work from my fingertips.

There are several stories from smoking apple infused wacky tobaccy, to Jobs and Wozniak working on an apple farm together, to specifically choosing the religious symbol of ‘knowledge’, to their love of the Beatles whose music label was Apple Records, right through to computers being all about bytes. The later is the line one of my tertiary lecturers took when talking about brand power in 98.

But the truth (as my friend had rightfully pointed out) was something to do with the farm. The name was not conceived while working on the farm but it was largely the inspiration. Back in 1976 Jobs was working in a farm in Oregon (a community fruit type thing) and it is his time here that inspired him to name the company Apple Computers. Steve Wozniak (Apple’s co founder) was worried about the copyright problems... cut to 35 years on and it seems fine, well considering their brand equity perhaps a  lot better than fine.

This is highlighted and detailed in the book 'Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company' (No Starch Press, 2004) It looks at the way in which Apple was formed from a small club of ‘members’ into the billion dollar company it now is today.

The two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) on March 1 in 1976 wanted to start a computer company and they needed a name. A legal necessity to register it and incorporate. According to Wozniak, both he and Steve were driving along State Highway 85 between Palo Alto and Los Altos when Steve Jobs came up with a name “Apple Computers” (oh yes, on a road trip no less.) Jobs was involved with a group of his friends in running a community fruit farm in Oregon part time while he also worked in the Bay Area of San Fran. Wozniak speculates that Jobs may have gotten this name from the farm or because of his music tastes, heavily into Apple Records.

In the book Wozniak said this about the name of the company:

Jobs said ‘I’ve got a great name: Apple Computer.’ Maybe he worked in apple trees. I didn’t even ask. Maybe it had some other meaning to him. Maybe the idea just occurred based upon Apple Records. He had been a musical person, like many technical people are. It might have sounded good partly because of that connotation. I thought instantly, ‘We’re going to have a lot of copyright problems.’ 

He goes on to discuss how he and Jobs tried other alternate names such as Executex and Matrix Electronics! Haha ~ aren’t we glad they didn’t go with those. They didn’t namely because they didn’t like it as much as Apple Computers. And so, the name was born.

Later in an effort to back their ‘simplicty’ brand essence, the company was changed to just Apple - and dropped the Computers part, especially as they were highly successful at diversifying into iPods and iPhones.

 So, essentially the name of the Apple Company was nothing fancy or pretenious, it was named after a fruit. (Very Forest Gump)

There are many further articles posted everywhere on the web as to the religious connotations but I can’t help but think religious connotations can effectively be applied to anything, anywhere at anytime? The other interesting piece was the reference to bytes. After searching far and wide on the web and in many books, there is no solid grounds to this theory other than a nice ‘link’ that gives the meaning of the Apple symbol more depth. This I think is an assumption made in hindsight.

The other unanswered question is why the Beatles music took so long to be released in the iTunes environment. There are many articles on the web about the legal complications between Apple Computers and Apple Records including unfounded claims about a contract between the two Apples to not enter each others industry for both to be allowed to use the name.

Doesn’t make sense on a number of levels. No one on either Apple team would’ve seen the crossover back then even though today it is obvious. Therefore I am not sure why in an era of lack of competition they would've ringfenced trade agreements? There is nothing solid to support the claim and the more believable reason is as mentioned in an article on the Apple online community; that Apple has to deal with many music labels to make music available in iTunes and the label that bought Apple Records (once huge) rights to the Beatles catalogue has been difficult to deal with until recently.

So there you have it. I suppose we can be happy that it has a history and was not a typo error like in Google, or the All Blacks!

That was a fun article to look up.