Naming a company after a fruit is definitely unusual for a tech company. Jobs' friend and partner Wozniak wanted to name the company Matrix Electronics, as he believed it sounded cool. However Jobs had something else going on in his mind.
It wasn't a random choice at all. There are mainly 3 reasons for naming the company Apple.
- Jobs had adopted the fruitarian diet, consuming only fruits for most of his adult life. He believed that eating the fruit only diet would prevent body odour and would eliminate the need to bathe. His selective fruit to eat was apple, straight for weeks.
- His interest in apples grew even more while he was staying in the apple orchard in the late 70s. He enjoyed his stay there for months, pruning trees, picking apples. He was the one that completed electrical wiring in the barn.
When deciding on a new company name, Jobs suggested ‘Apple’ as it was fresh in his memory from the orchard.
- His third reason was that he wanted a company name that would be listed before Atari in the phonebook. He had a grudge on Atari from when he held a job at the company.
As he avoided bathing, his co-workers at Atari complained about the smell and management had to give Jobs an ultimatum, either to start bathing or to find another job.
So because of his great experience at the apple orchard, his diet preferences and his want to get ahead of Atari, Jobs finalized on the name Apple.
To answer your second part of the question, Apple wanted to redesign their original hand drawn logo of Isaac Newton under an apple tree as it was a little too complicated to be printed on the computers.
Rob Janoff was assigned as the designer. Jobs made only one request saying, "don't make it cute".
In those days logos were mostly text based but Rob decided to focus on the imagery of an apple.
He found a problem that a simple Apple logo can be mistaken with other fruits such as cherry, as there was no clear context of how large or small the fruit might be.
A bite was then added and people immediately identified the logo as an apple. Colorful stripes represented that they were the only manufacturers with a color display.
When the logo was shown to Jobs, he said, "okay, that's nice" and made it the official logo of the company.
There are several myths floating on the internet, but this story is true to the source.
Isn't it weird to see the Apple logo without the bite?
