Apple’s Bold Moves: A History of Risk and Innovation
Dropping the “i” Prefix: A Potential Change
If Apple were to drop the iconic “i” from its product names, it wouldn’t be the company’s most significant transformation. According to Ken Segall, Apple is no stranger to major overhauls, and CEO Tim Cook likely wouldn’t be too concerned about letting go of the Jobs-era prefix. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on this matter.
“Apple has done some amazingly bold, rash, risky things in the past,” says Segall. “Every time they changed processors or transformed the OS, experts were like, ‘Oh my, seriously? You’re gonna rebuild the operating system, or you’re going to transition to a whole new hardware platform?’ But Apple did it.”
The Evolution of Apple
Segall acknowledges that today’s Apple is much larger than it was during Steve Jobs’ era, with more financial stakes and jobs on the line. This might make the company more cautious. However, Apple still aims to be seen as an innovator, and sticking with a product name solely for brand equity isn’t typically Apple’s style.
“Think Different,”
ran Apple’s legendary, Emmy-winning 1997 advertisement, a campaign Segall worked on. He co-wrote the copy for the 60-second TV ad that featured several pre-Apple geniuses like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King Jr., highlighting that the “people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do.”
The Impact of the Think Different Campaign
The Think Different campaign was a placeholder; Apple had no new products to sell at the time. As Jobs often mentioned, the company was just 90 days from bankruptcy, making his return to the company he co-founded in 1976 a significant risk for investors.
The Birth of the iMac
MacMan or iMac?
Just weeks before its launch, the original iMac had no official name.
The Think Different campaign boosted Apple’s brand awareness, but it was the launch and massive sales of the iMac in 1998 that truly transformed the company’s profitability. This “Bondi Blue” computer was crucial for Apple, and Jobs made this clear to his advertising agency, TBWAChiatDay.
Initially codenamed C1, the iMac was designed to be an affordable, consumer-friendly computer that could easily connect to the internet—a rare feature in the 1990s. The iMac was bright, fun, easy to use, and wildly successful, setting Apple on the path to becoming the world’s richest company in 2011. (Earlier this year, Apple was overtaken by Microsoft as the largest global company by market capitalization.)
Naming the iMac
Weeks before its launch, the iMac still had no official name. Apple’s marketing and product teams considered names like “Rocket Mac,” “EveryMac,” and “Maxter” before leaning towards “MacMan,” inspired by Sony’s Walkman.
“[Jobs] liked that MacMan sounded like Walkman, which was the world’s most famous and profitable electronic device at the time,” says Segall.
Jobs was pleased with the association, even giving a speech to the marketing team about Sony’s success as a consumer electronics company. He believed that if Apple could gain some of that success by naming their product MacMan, it would be beneficial. However, Segall notes that this wasn’t very “think different” of Jobs.
1 Comment
Is anyone really surprised by this?