Naming Apple

The two Steves, in the beginning:

Now that they had decided to start a business, they needed a name. Jobs had gone for another visit to the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the Gravenstein apple trees, and Wozniak picked him up at the airport. On the ride down to Los Altos, they bandied around options. They considered some typical tech words, such as Matrix, and some neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like Personal Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the next day, when Jobs wanted to start filing the papers. Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with Apple. And they did.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple Inc., no comma. “Apple,” unlike, say, “Executek,” is a name built to last.

Also from Walter Isaacson’s biography
Steve Jobs at college (and typos)

[The All One Farm: an Oregon commune founded by Jobs’s Reed College friend Richard Friedland.]