Historical Events  Brands
MacIntosh Apple

MMDE: MacIntosh Apple

Current: McIntosh Apple

What kind of Apple?

The McIntosh Apple is the national Apple of Canada, and was named in 1811, when John McIntosh discovered the unknown sapling on his farm and began cultivating and grafting the fruit from it.

Of course it's become famous for a different reason more recently, when the Apple computer company named a line of their desktops and later laptops after it - the "Apple MacIntosh".

Many people remember the spelling as "MacIntosh" all along, and there are many references to this to be found today. Are they experiencing a Mass Memory Discrepancy Effect as a simple result of people misspelling the actual fruit after having become so familiar with the computer? 

Origin

The story goes Steve Jobs was on a fruit diet when he visited a farm just as he was trying to come up with a name for his new computer company. later, when the fashion to give computers catchy internal code names took off, Jef Raskin continued the theme by naming his latest design the McIntosh, named directly after the strain of apple. The name stuck, but they knew right away they should be careful so changed the spelling to MacIntosh, and applied for the trademarks and rights for that branding. Others then began to just refer to it as the Apple Mac, and this is the name which became popular.

There were later battles with the Beatles record label, which became especially prickly later on, since in  the early days it was clear than one was in the music business and one in computers. Then came along iTunes...

Unfortunately, the actual apple McIntosh hasn't fared so well over the years, and from it's dominant position in the 1960's where it held a commanding lead of 40%, it's now down to around 5% market share.

The other aspect to this is the pronunciation - it's exactly the same as MacKintosh with a "K", which of course is the raincoat line, but no-one is claiming this has anything to do with any fruit - yet!!!