The end of ‘iPhone’ | WIRED

If Apple drops the “i,” this is unlikely to be the company’s most significant change. Segall pointed out that the company is used to overhauls, and he believes Apple CEO Tim Cook won’t lose any sleep over dropping the Jobs-era prefix. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

“Apple has done some incredibly bold, rash and risky things in the past,” Segall said. “Every time they change processors or switch operating systems, the experts say, ‘Oh my gosh, are you serious? Are you going to rebuild the operating system or are you going to move to a completely new hardware platform?’ But Apple did it.”

He admits that Apple today is much bigger than it was in Jobs’s day – with more cash and more jobs – and that Apple may therefore be more risk-averse. However, they still want to be known as an innovator, and sticking to a product name solely for brand equity reasons is not the Apple way.

“Think differently,” ran Apple’s legendary 1997 Emmy-winning ad, a campaign created by Segall. He wrote the copy for a 60-second television commercial that brought together some of the pre-Apple geniuses—from Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King Jr. to Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, and other “misfits, rebels, and troublemakers”—flag that “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” .

The campaign went smoothly; Apple had no new products to sell, and as Jobs often told people at the time and afterward, the company was only 90 days away from bankruptcy, his return to the company he co-founded in 1976 was a significant risk for investors.

MacMan iMac

The Think Different campaign improved Apple’s brand perception, but it wasn’t until the launch—and huge sales—of the iMac in 1998 that the company’s bottom line turned around. This “Bondi Blue” was make or break for Apple, and Jobs made no secret of this fact from his outside advertising agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day.

Originally codenamed C1, this relatively inexpensive, consumer-oriented computer was marketed as a machine that could easily connect to the Internet – a task that is now common but very difficult. a rarity in the 1990s. The iMac was bright, fun, easy to use, and wildly successful, putting Apple on a path to becoming the world’s richest company by 2011. (Earlier this year, Apple has overcome because Microsoft is the largest global company by market capitalization.)

Weeks since its launch, the original iMac still doesn’t have an official name. Apple’s internal product and marketing teams toyed with “Rocket Mac,” “EveryMac,” and “Maxter” before favoring “MacMan,” an introduction to the Walkman, the influential portable music player and best-selling produced and marketed by Sony since 1979.

“[Jobs] liked that the MacMan sounded like the Walkman, the most famous and profitable electronic device in the world at the time,” Segall said.

“He is very happy with the association. He gave a speech to the marketing team, saying that Sony was such a successful consumer electronics company that one day Apple might want to be like that, and if we had any trouble getting along Cooperate with MacMan, he’ll be fine with that. ” Segall agrees that it wasn’t Jobs’s “different thinking.”