For 16 years, Apple has bestowed the prefix “i” on the names of most of its groundbreaking products, from the iMac to the iPad.
Not so with the Apple Watch, announced Tuesday.
The company did not call its new wearable product the iWatch, the speculative nickname that virtually everyone in the media and technology industry had taken to using ahead of Apple’s announcement. John Gruber, a prominent Apple blogger, noted the passing of a tradition:
What happened?
There were hints this year that Apple could face trademark obstacles to using the iWatch name.
In May, the chief executive of Swatch, the world’s biggest watchmaker, told Bloomberg that the company had begun notifying authorities in various countries that any use of the term iWatch by Apple might cause confusion with iSwatch, a digital watch made by Swatch.
Earlier, Apple had signaled its interest in the iWatch name by applying for trademarks in Japan, South Korea and other countries.
Apple has deviated from its iHabit — call it a “pre-fixation” — before. It avoided the letter entirely with its MacBook line.
In 2006, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, unveiled the television companion device that is today called Apple TV. At the time, Mr. Jobs said Apple was calling the device iTV, emphasizing that it was a code name. When the product went on sale to the public the next year, the company mysteriously renamed it Apple TV, without explaining the switch.
A clue may have come in recent years, as rumors of a new Apple television product swirled and the media and Wall Street analysts resurrected the iTV name. In 2010, that prompted an executive at the British broadcaster ITV to say that the company would oppose any attempt by Apple to use the brand name.
Yet Apple has not been bashful about tangling with other big companies over a product name. Immediately after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, a name that had been rumored for months, Cisco sued Apple for trademark infringement, over a name it said it had owned since 2000. An Apple spokesman declared the suit “silly” at the time. About a month later, the two parties settled their dispute for undisclosed terms.
Apple began using the “i” prefix on its product names back in 1998, when Mr. Jobs, who only recently had returned to the company, used it on the iMac, the candy-colored computer that helped reinvigorate the company’s portfolio of products. At an event where he showed off the computer to a boisterous crowd, Mr. Jobs said that the “i” in iMac stood for a lot of things, including Internet, individual, instruct, inform and inspire.
Here’s Mr. Jobs at the event:
Ken Segall, a former creative executive with Apple’s advertising agency who was involved in picking the iMac name, has written about the process on his website, saying the versatility of the name was part of its appeal.
“It was endearing,” Mr. Segall wrote. “It had personality. It was easy. It could be extended into new product names. With these beginnings, iMac had a pretty good shot at success.”
Indeed, Apple spent more than a decade using the naming convention on products like iTunes, iWork, iPhone and iCloud. When he was serving as interim chief executive of Apple after his return, Mr. Jobs himself was nicknamed the “iCEO” for a time by media and analysts, a term Mr. Jobs said he liked.
Eventually, Mr. Jobs dropped the “interim” from his title and simply became the company’s chief executive. And with Apple Watch, Apple is dropping the “i” once again.