Even if you’ve never owned an iPhone, you’re no doubt familiar with Apple and its many products. The story behind its name, it turns out, is pretty simple.
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Have you ever looked at your iPhone, iPad, or Mac and wondered just why Apple is called Apple? The name certainly makes the company stand out among its rivals. We’ve got Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM, AMD, Atari, and thousands of other names that either don’t mean anything or that relate to technology in some way. In that crowd, Apple is a whole different story. Is there a deep meaning behind the name, or did it just happen to be the one that stuck in the company’s early days? To find the answers, we’ll have to go all the way back to when Apple Computers, Inc. was founded. Two college dropouts and friends, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, created Apple on April 1, 1976 (via Library of Congress). According to Ann Brashares, author of “Steve Jobs Thinks Different,” both Jobs and Wozniak wanted to create a computer that regular people could keep in their homes and offices. Back in 1976, computers were enormous mainframes that took tremendous amounts of space — entire rooms, even. Jobs and Wozniak teamed up to build a computer that was simple and small enough that everybody in the world could have one if they wanted to. As per that same book, Jobs and Wozniak set their plan in motion by creating Apple Computers and setting up shop in the Jobs’ family garage. Equipped with not much else but their enthusiasm for the idea, they were eventually able to build their first machine, dubbed “Apple I” — thus only reinforcing the naming and the brand.
