Ask HN: The word App is in Apple. Was that a conscious decision by its founders?

3 points by mettamage 7y ago ↗ HN

I never thought about it, but then it's just so obvious. Was this decision a conscious one? I can't find it on Google. If so, that's pretty clever.

This would imply that the naming of Apple is based on the word "application" which might be slightly far-fetched.

Brandname generation: pick a word (abbreviate or not) then find a word similar to it, pick that as your logo, provided it's not something terrible.

8 comments

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joezydeco 7y ago ↗

Apple was founded in 1976. There was no idea of downloadable apps back then.

From a Woz interview in 1984:

"[Steve Jobs] was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned."

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1984-12/1984_12_BYT...

mtmail 7y ago ↗

"According to Steve Jobs, the company's name was inspired by his visit to an apple farm while on a fruitarian diet. Jobs thought the name "Apple" was "fun, spirited and not intimidating"" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Corporate_identity

geophile 7y ago ↗

We didn't have "applications" back then, we had "programs".

cweiss 7y ago ↗

I'd love a citation on that. Not to prove you right/wrong, I'd just love to see the definitive etymology of "Application" to describe software. I'm trying to remember what 'software' was called in the mainframe docs I looked at back then.

Wikipedia says: `The first modern theory of software was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1935 essay Computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem).[2]`, but I think that was being used as a verb, not noun.

geophile 7y ago ↗

I don't have a citation, just my memory.

geophile 7y ago ↗

Actually, I think I know a little about the etymology. There was (and is) "systems programming" and "application programming". I suspect the term "application" comes from there.

mettamage 7y ago ↗

Thanks for the answers, that seems like a fun coincidence then!

LarryMade2 7y ago ↗

As I recall growing up "application" was a popular Macintosh marketing term to make software sound cooler than being just some boring "program". (PCs run programs - Macs run applications!) It was shortened to apps later likely with the iPhone and the app store.