“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.