The Amazing Story Behind Apple’s Choice of the Name Macintosh in the Mid-1980s.
Still and always a story of apples ...
Most people know that Steve Jobs is the founder of Apple. Fewer people know that Steve Jobs was not alone when Apple was founded on April 1, 1976, in Los Altos, California. These people know that Steve Wozniak was also at the origin of Apple with Steve Jobs. What most people don't know is that there was a third person at the beginning of the adventure: Ronald Wayne.
Ronald Wayne is even at the origin of the first logo of the firm and various documents, like the one of the Apple I computer. He owned 10% of Apple's shares at the beginning, but he quickly got scared and decided 12 days later to sell all his shares for $800. Indeed, Ronald Wayne was afraid to be liable for the company's debts on his assets.
Ronald Wayne's fear came from the fact that Steve Jobs had quickly indebted Apple in cash and material. Today, at the age of 88, Ronald Wayne would have a fortune of nearly $250 billion if he had been bolder. He would simply be the richest man in the world ahead of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
In his defense, it must be said that Ronald Wayne's situation was somewhat different from the other two co-founders who were only 21 and 25 years old and had nothing. Ronald Wayne was already 42 years old and he would have been the only one to whom the creditors would have turned since he was the only one who had seizable assets.
Having said that, I think even fewer people know why Apple chose the name Macintosh in 1984 to market its new computer.
Apple aficionados must have already heard about this story, but for the general public, it's a mystery. The anecdote behind the choice of this name tells part of the story of the Cupertino firm in its early years. If the Macintosh series of personal computers were produced and marketed from 1984 onwards, the roots of the name go further back in time.
This funny fact can also be seen as a wink, voluntary or not, to the brand itself - Apple having chosen a crooked apple as a logo. Indeed, before being a very famous range of computers, Macintosh, or rather McIntosh, is a variety ... of apple, and this for more than 200 years, because it owes its name to John McIntosh, who discovered in the early 18th century in Canada.
It was chance and Jef Raskin's taste that led the American company to name its computer brand after it. Jef Raskin is the specialist in the human-computer interface that Apple called upon at the beginning of the Macintosh project. The confirmation of the choice of the name Macintosh came from Jef Raskin himself, in 1996, via an email or a message published on a newsgroup.
The testimony was shared on a site that was active between 2001 and 2015 but has not responded since. Fortunately, its remains are still visible, thanks to the Internet Archive:
Jef Raskin was a very reliable source on Apple. Sadly deceased in 2005, he is the one who designed the interface of the first Apple operating system, macOS. He was also one of the architects of the first Macintosh. Recruited in 1978 by Apple, he was one of the pioneers of the company, which was then only two years old, before leaving in 1982.
He tells in his message:
“My primary role in this matter was to create the Macintosh project. I named it for my favorite kind of eatin' apple, the succulent McIntosh (I changed the spelling of the name to avoid potential conflict with McIntosh, the audio equipment manufacturer). There have been, as Horn points out, many inaccurate recountings of the early Mac history. The best I've seen (the guy did some heavy-duty research) is Owen Linzmeyer's "The Mac Bathroom Reader". My own history of the Mac (entitled "The Mac and Me") is currently being serialized in the Computer Historical Association of California's journal.”
Aware of the risks of legal proceedings by McIntosh Laboratory, an American company already established at the end of the '40s and specialized in audio equipment, it is necessary to choose a rewriting, adding the “a” and removing the capital letter from the “i”.
According to the book “Apple confidential 2.0: the definitive history of the world's most colorful company” by Owen W. Linzmayer, Steve Jobs, the founder of the company, tried to reach an agreement with McIntosh Laboratory to get permission to use the name. He was unsuccessful. So, according to the author, Apple was forced to buy the rights to use the identity.
Today, the use of the Macintosh identity in Apple products has fallen somewhat into disuse. The Apple brand uses it much less, if at all. If they still belong to the big Macintosh family, new product families have taken over in the 2000s and 2010s, with names like iBook, PowerBook, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac, and MacBook.