“Apple advertising legend Ken Segall revealed some cracking reminiscences from his time at Apple, including some rare Steve Jobs lapses of taste, a furious row between Jobs and design guru Jonathan Ive, and the original name suggested for the iPhone,” Simon Jary reports for PC Advisor.
“Segall, speaking at a Books For Breakfast event on a tour to promote his book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, remembers exactly where he was when Steve Jobs returned to power at Apple in 1997,” Jary reports. “He had been working on the AT&T advertising account for just six weeks when he received a series of phone calls from Steve Jobs and ad agency Chiat\Day to ‘Get the band back together.'”
Jary reports, “It was Segall who came up with the name iMac, which Jobs eventually warmed to after initially ‘hating’ it. The ‘i’ stood for Imagination, Individual and Internet, among other positive notions. Steve had wanted to call the new Bondi Blue computer ‘MacMan’ – a ‘pretty darn stupid’ name apparently dreamed up by Apple Marketing chief Phil Schiller… Segall remembers Steve Jobs and Apple’s head of product design Jony (now Sir Jonathan) Ive as ‘inseparable’: ‘They were as close as lovers,’ he recalled. But, like all lovers, they had their tiffs.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If they’d named it “MacMan” even Jobs’ RDF might not have been able to sell it and the company might not even be here today.
Well Pixar had RenderMan then (still do). Maybe that was the inspiration for the name.
No. It was Walkman. Steve had a boner for Sony at the time.
So then we would have had to suffer with PhoneMan, PadMan, PodMan, WorkMan, MobileMeMan, PhotoMan, DVDMan, etc. etc. Not to mention some stupid commercial where the MacMan sprouts legs to go get something.
Thank God Jobs warmed up to iMac.
or the use of “e” before every name,
the eMate300…
Who knows… what would have happened if…
Looking at past is great in order to learn something from it but these details are not the lessons to learn from… this is only gossip.
I love reading stories about SJ from people who were in the Apple inner circle. They show that not every idea SJ had was good, despite his uncanny ability to see into what consumers want. For all of the props he gets for Apple’s success, the companies good fortunes are very much a team effort.
Yea but everyone always tells the same story . . .
“I” had this great idea that Steve Jobs hated, but he eventually came around because my idea was so great!”
‘Ive was “driven crazy” by Steve’s choices, and eventually stormed out of the room to his holiday, shouting that Steve could choose any of the colours he liked but he was taking no more part in the discussion.’
True Brit, he shouted “colours”…
totally droll…!!
i can see Ives losing his temper for sure – lol.
MacMan? LMAO.
“‘If it weren’t for me, you’d probably be sitting there with your PhoneMan right now,’ Segall quipped.”
Hilarious.
“MacMan.” That’s what the babes call me.
Yes, MacMan is a stupid name, but some questionable names are close enough to reasonable that we eventually get used to them. Remember how the moniker iPad was initially mocked because it smacked of a feminine hygiene product? Then folks got their hands on Apple’s magic tablet and the mocking ended.
The Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian iMacs were another lapse in judgment. They were axed pretty quick.
Also interesting to read (again) was the companion link to a Jony Ive interview after he was knighted. It was almost as if i was hearing Steve Jobs again: Paraphrasing such observations as, Design is not only how it looks, it is also how it works; behind the cabinet becomes the back of the drawer. And so on. Both men’s commitment to making something better has enriched all our lives. Hopefully their core beliefs will be internalized by another generation.