Do you know what the i in the iPhone means?

iPhone is the most popular The Top 10 Selling Smartphones Of 2023 Are All From Just 2 Companies / Forbes mobile phone in the world and certainly one of the most recognizable. It is not difficult to guess what Phone means in its name. But why do we need an i at the very beginning, and a lowercase one at that?

The company has had the tradition of setting this letter before the product name for a long time, and it did not start with the iPhone. Before him there were iMacs, iBooks, iPods and other similar devices. According to fan calculations, over the past three decades, Apple has developed List of Apple product names that start with «i» / Apple Wiki at least 23 products whose names began with a lowercase i.

I first appeared in 1998 in iMac — it is one of the most popular and successful devices in the history of the company. Then Apple was going through hard times and almost went bankrupt, but this computer literally pulled out Our Bad. WIRED Had Some Tips for Apple—We Were Wrong / WIRED her from the other world.

At first, Steve Jobs wanted to name the device MacMan because it reflected its "friendly" appearance.

Man means a person, and Mac is a part of Macintosh, an already established brand of Apple computers.

But one of the Apple employees, Ken Segall, found the courage to object to the boss. He described Steve Jobs Almost Named The iMac The MacMan, Until This Guy Stopped Hi / Fast Company the name MacMan is described as very mediocre and "disappointing". And he added that it caused the entire development team to be "allergic." In addition, it could be associated with the name of the Walkman player from competitors — Sony.

Segall suggested that Jobs name the device iMac, where i is short for "Internet". Yes, the ability of the new Apple computer to connect to the world Wide Web was its "killer feature", and Ken decided to hint at this in the title. Everything is connected to the Internet now, up to dummies, but in 1998 such features were new.

Jobs initially stated Steve Jobs Almost Named The iMac The MacMan, Until This Guy Stopped Hi / Fast Company that he "hates" the iMac, but later revised his opinion and agreed to name the computer that way. And during the presentation of the device on May 6, 1998, he generally said The First iMac Introduction / YouTube that "the iMac is a combination of the joy of the Internet and the simplicity of the Macintosh."

Since then, the company has been putting i in the names of many of its products — both hardware (iPod, iPad, iPhone) and software: iOS, iCall, iTunes, iBooks. At the same time, Apple initially planned to have its first phone What Does the «i» in iPhone Stand For? / How-To Geek to name Mobi, TriPod, TelePod and even iPad, but eventually came to a simple and memorable iPhone.

In it, i carried the same meaning as in the first iMac, because the ability to access the Network from a mobile phone in 2007 was presented Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone / Apple Apple as revolutionary (maybe these guys just haven't heard of Opera Mini).