A Brief History of Apple’s Computers…
iOS VPN App
How did Apple come up with the name Macintosh and – more importantly – does it have any special meaning? Let’s investigate the history of Apple’s Macintosh line of computers and find out…
Names – especially brand names – are funny things. They get inside your head, become part of the zeitgeist and, most people, have no idea of where they came from or who invented them. We’ve already covered what the “I” in iPhone means. But where did the word Macintosh come from for Apple’s desktop and laptop computers?
As always, we need to go back in time a bit – specifically the early 1980s. This was when a very young Steve Jobs unleashed the very first Apple Macintosh onto the world. The Macintosh – a simplified Lisa computer – launched in 1984 and its name, Macintosh, was created by Jef Raskin who took the name from a type of Apple.
Who Invented The Brand Name, Macintosh?
The apple in question, technically called McIntosh, is the national apple of Canada. It has red or green skin, a tart flavor, and is best eaten in and around September. Raskin figured the name was a good fit, and Steve Jobs agreed. It tied up nicely with the company’s branding. And Mac is also a fairly common computing term also – it’s an acronym for Media Access Control.
Apple wasn’t the only company that liked the name, though. Much to the annoyance of Steve Jobs, another company already owned the trademark McIntosh, a company called McIntosh Laboratory. And they didn’t like the idea of Apple using its brand name for its new computer. Apple could not get around the trademark, so Jobs changed the name Macintosh and the rest, as they say, is history.
A Different Kind of Apple (Computer)…
The reason Apple decided to go with Macintosh in the first place was that the first-ever Macintosh computer was so different from everything else on the market, as well as everything Apple had released to date. It was a “different kind of Apple” and it deserved a different type of branding. Hence the creation of the brand name, Macintosh.
The first Macintosh computer was the first commercially available home computer to feature a graphical user…
