How Apple got its name? In 1976 Steve Jobs was working in a community type farm in Oregon and that inspired him to name the company Apple Computers. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co founder was worried about the copyright problems, but it turned out fine.

This is excerpted from the book Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company (No Starch Press, 2004), how Apple was formed from a club of members to a billion dollar company.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in March 1, 1976 wanted to start a computer company and they needed a name to register it as incorporation. According to Wozniak, both he and Steve were driving along the Highway 85 between Palo Alto and Los Altos. Steve Jobs came up with a name “Apple Computers” during that trip.

Steve Jobs was involved with a group of his friends in running a community type of farm in Oregon. He was doing this part time, while working in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Wozniak thinks he might have got this name idea either from the farm or because of his music tastes, Apple Records, which was quiet, popular with Beatles.

Wozniak said this in the book about the name of the company:

he (Jobs) said ‘I’ve got a great name: Apple Computer.’ Maybe he worked in apple trees. I didn’t even ask. Maybe it had some other meaning to him. Maybe the idea just occurred based upon Apple Records. He had been a musical person, like many technical people are. It might have sounded good partly because of that connotation. I thought instantly, ‘We’re going to have a lot of copyright problems.’

Both Wozniak and Jobs tried other alternate names such as Executex and Matrix Electronics, but they didn’t like it as much as Apple Computers. And the name was born.

Later the company was changed to Apple and dropped the Computers part, after they successfully diversified into iPods and iPhones.

The name of the Apple Company was nothing fancy or glamorous; it was just named after an apple fruit. But at least it was not a typo error like in Google, which had its original name as Googol and a student mistook the name and spelled it wrong during registration.