“Something interesting happened last year. In many ways, 2014 marked the beginning of the end of Apple’s signature ‘i’ branding,” Evan Niu writes for The Motley Fool. “In fact, the last time Apple launched anything with the ‘i’ brand was iCloud in 2011. That was four years ago.”
“Last year marked the first major introduction of a new product category in several years, and Apple’s first smartwatch was officially named Apple Watch — not iWatch,” Niu writes. “Apple’s new payment service was also dubbed Apple Pay — not iPay. Apple continued this trend this year with the launch of its on-demand music streaming service Apple Music — not iMusic.”
“The original iMac was the first product to incorporate the ‘i’ branding, which was launched nearly two decades ago in 1998,” Niu writes. “Since appending ‘i’ to the beginning of a word is infinitely reproducible, the result over time has been a significant dilution of the brand. Apple doesn’t want that. It doesn’t want to be associated with the countless number of companies trying to piggyback on its branding. Instead, shifting to an ‘Apple [product or service]’ is a better solution because it is easier to defend and less generic.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, keep the ones you already have buttoned up (iMac, iOS, iPhone, iPad, iPod, iCLoud), but everything new starts with Apple, like, for example, “Apple Car.”
