What’s the deal with the “i”? Why does Apple call everything i-something (iMac, iCal, iPhone), and when did that start?
To understand where the “i” in Apple’s product names comes from, we need to take a stroll back to 1998. Mac|Life was known as MacAddict, and Apple had just hired Steve Jobs back as interim CEO. Apple’s future looked pretty bleak at the time, but it had a surprise up its sleeve. The first product released under Steve Jobs’ new reign was a little something called iMac.
Pretty retro, huh? Before the iMac, no one really bothered to think much about what your computer looked like.
This machine completely changed the computer industry. A huge hit, it reversed Apple’s fortunes -- and it was also the first Apple product to feature the notorious “i” prefix. In those days, the “i” stood for “internet” because the new iMac was built with the internet in mind. It was the first Mac to ditch the not-quite-antiquated-yet floppy drive, and the iMac also brought USB to the Mac for the first time.
Perhaps because of the success of the iMac (the company’s first successful product launch in years) or because the “i” just made everything sound cool, Apple ended up sticking with this naming convention. While the “i” in the product name may still stand for “internet,” we think Apple may have shifted away from this meaning. These days, the “i” seems to exist to say “Hey, remember the iPod/iPhone/iCloud? We made all that stuff too!”
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hypersapien
August 26, 2011 at 2:10pm
A friend of mine was poo-pooing apple when that recent news story came out about the name "iCloud" being trademarked by some other company. Then I reminded him that it was Apple that made putting "i" on the front of your product cool in the first place, and any other company that did it is clearly trying to leech off of their success anyways.
