Why Steve Jobs called it Apple

Marques Brownlee, Hayley Loren and Wren Weichman discuss the petty reason behind Steve Jobs' choice of company name.

GUESTS:

HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.

RECORDED AT & EDITED BY: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITOR: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS SYSTEM & DESIGN: Chris Hanel at Support Class.
GRAPHICS ASSISTANCE: Dillon Pentz.
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS: Josh Halbur, Ben Justice, Lewis Tough, Arun Uttamchandani, Eglė Vaškevičiūtė.
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.

[BlueMountain]

HAL Laboratory, a video game developer closely tied to Nintendo which created the Kirby Franchise, actually extended this over their entire name - each letter is "one step ahead" of IBM.

[satiric_]

There was also a band in the 60s who named themselves The Beau Brummels, with the idea that they would be the first band after The Beatles in the alphabetically sorted record stores.

[ozen.m]

Please post the full episodes on YouTube

[vidumori]

This reminded me of the german city Aachen - in germany cities that are considered a "spa" (not sure if thats the correct term, the german one would be Kurort) are permitted to add the word "Bad" (literraly meaning "bath", but refering to the spa-aspect) to the front of their name. We've got places like "Bad Harzburg" or "Bad Krozingen". But Aachen decided not to do that - because with the double A its at the top of every list, but if they added the Bad...

[TS]

Full episodes via video on YouTube PLEASE !! For video, for subtitles, for accessibility!

And Activision did the same thing for the same reason

[LightPink]

A video with mkbhd!?! I sure wish I could watch the whole thing

[clpsplug]

There’s a company who tried to pull similar trick in Japan. Their name is “Art moving company.” The hilarious part is that other moving services followed suit and one of them literally named themselves “Aah Aah Aah” so that nobody could appear earlier than them 😂

[Klick]

Acclaim did the same thing when they split from Activision, who did the same thing when they split from Atari

[thall]

I was at a talk Nolan Bushnell gave about Atari and he had some interesting quotes about Mr. Jobs. Yes, Mr. Jobs did, in fact, think he didn't need to take a bath, and all the personnel at Atari can confirm that he did, in fact, NEED to take a bath. :O

[DarthSmirnoff]

So, are full video episodes NOT going to be posted here?

[DJVLDN]

At the height of the pandemic, on the UK government website, test providers were listed alphabetically so a lot of them chose a name that would put them at the top like 123Tests or #1Tests or !Labs, etc

As time went on, the name you’d need to be at the top of the list became absolutely ridiculous. Just all the signs and punctuation marks followed by a lot of 1 and then finally a group of A

[christophmuller]

I missed 3 episodes because I didn’t want to watch just 5 minutes excerpts :/ maybe just put it on here a week after publishing the podcast?

[hebl]

1 full episode: 246k views
all other 7 highlight videos: 169k views COMBINED
Whatever your "YT algorithm experts" are saying, they are wrong, Tom. Just look at the numbers. We prefer full length episodes.

[HomoKieran]

So is there anywhere to watch the full episodes, with video? The website only links to audio streams, I can't imagine they go through the effort to record the entire show and do visuals but only save and update short highlight segments. Was it broadcast live anywhere?

[mondark]

it seems like such a shame that you would record videos yet it is not available on youtube

[MadTamB]

Other reasons I've heard are...

That he liked the Beatles (and they had named their company apple). This came back to bite him in the bum later, when they sued him.

Also as a nod to Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple and that's why it has a bite out of it.

[oxoniumgirl]

Full episodes please Tom! I'm hard of hearing and don't do audio only media!

[ieyke]

ZZ Top did the same thing in reverse, because it was super easy to find the last band in the music store.
That combined with wanting to mimic the names of musicians like B.B. King.

[panda]

I am not a native English speaker, but is the question wrong or does the word "avenge" mean two different things?

I though that he "avenged his previous employer" means that somebody (3rd party) had done wrong to Atari, and Jobs named his company apple to be mean to that 3rd party, thereby avenging his former employer...

Apparently in this context it meant more like "he took a revenge on Atari", which is the exact opposite of my default understanding of the word "avenge".

so is the question bugged or is this a stupid homonym (the same word meaning two opposite things would really be a stupid homonym)?

[curtismmichaels]

A local computer repairman, back in the 90's called his business OIC. I asked why and he said, "Because when I show someone how to solve their problem they always say, 'Ohhhh I See!"