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There’s Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM, AMD, Atari, and then there’s Apple.

That name sticks out like a green fruit on a tree of red ones, but that wasn’t exactly the founders’ intention.

Luckily it worked out for the late Steve Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak really well.

The two college dropouts and friends created Apple on April 1, 1976, working on the world’s first home computer out of Jobs’ family garage.

(We won’t talk about the third co-founder, Ronald Wayne, who sold his share of the company 12 days later.)

Their world-changing idea was to make a computer simple and small enough to fit into everyone’s home, which was quite a stretch from the enormous computer mainframes available at the time:

As for the name of their company, it came about pretty randomly and stuck mostly because it sounded fun and easy.

Here’s the story from Slash Gear:

In Steve Jobs’ biography, penned by Walter Isaacson, Jobs told the author that he was currently on one of his fruitarian diets. The day he came up with the name for the company that would change his life, he was on his way back from an apple farm.

This is corroborated in Steve Wozniak’s autobiography “iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon.” Wozniak, who drove Jobs back from the airport after that trip, said that the company name was made on that very drive.

Apparently, the place Jobs referred to as an “apple orchard” was in fact some kind of commune.

The suggestion of “Apple Computer” apparently sounded “fun, spirited, and not intimidating” to Jobs, which aligned with the goals of the company: to democratise and revolutionise computing, making it more approachable and easy to use.

The only problem was that The Beatles had (still have) their own record label called Apple Records. As you can imagine, Apple Computer was sued by Apple Records for trademark violations, ending in an $80 000 settlement.

It’s also reported that Jobs and Wozniak had tried to come up with a different, more techy sounding name (like Executex or Matrix Electronics), according to the book Apple Confidential 2.0, but nothing charmed the founders as much as Apple did.

There was another reason that the name stuck.

In a 1980 presentation, Jobs, who previously worked for tech competitors Atari, said that Apple Computer was created because he liked apples a lot, and because it was ahead of Atari in the phone book.

In case you’re from the generation who’s never seen a phonebook in their lifetime, it looks like this:

When Apple was created, those big hunky phonebooks were still a thing, and having your brand name appear near the top of any list was basically like free advertising.

At the end of the day, though, both Jobs and Wozniak just liked the name Apple a lot.

Eventually, the company stepped out of the garage and onto the global stage, and is now recognised worldwide as a tech giant with products that continually top sales charts.

Following through with the company’s original aim, Digicape, South Africa’s largest independent Apple retailer, is helping to make the products as accessible as possible.

With trade-in options and shelves always updated with the latest Apple goodies and gadgets, owning a smart computing device has become par for the course.

All in all, we’ve come a long, long way since that drive home from the airport.

[source:slashgear]