How Apple has steadily been dropping the 'i' (which can't be trademarked)

From the first iMac in the 1990s to today, the prefix "i" has symbolized
Apple - but Apple has been working to get rid of it since the original iPad
in 2010.

There is still of course the iPhone and the iPad - but there's no iWatch or
iTV, and certainly no iVision Pro. Across hardware, software, and services,
Apple named around 30 products with an i following the success of the iMac
in 1998.

It's just a letter, but it's so strongly associated with Apple that to this
day there are people who call the Apple Watch an iWatch.

They do so even though the last entirely new Apple products named with the
i prefix were iCloud and iAd in 2011. The last entirely new hardware device
was the iPad in 2010.

When Apple began dropping the i

There is still the iPhone and the iPad, plus the iMac, and iCloud, and
iMessage. But over the years, Apple has dropped the iPod and the iSight.

It's also dropped iBook - twice. First it was the name of Apple's consumer
laptop, and then it was the app for buying and reading books on iPads.

That got renamed Apple Books, and the iBooks Store went the same way. The
iTools, iDisk, iWeb, iChat, iSync, and iCal vanished alongside one you
probably never noticed, an iTunes feature called iMix.

There's another one, of course, as iTunes is still referenced occasionally.
The app is called Music and instead of selling tracks, Apple is pushing the
Apple Music streaming service.

We do still have iOS and iPadOS, plus iMovie, but iPhoto has become Photos,
and today iDVD sounds positive prehistoric.

The latter three are still officially part of what was called the iLife
collection of apps, while Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are still ostensibly
the iWork apps.

But the last release of a product called iLife was in 2010, and while iWork
has fared better, its last boxed release was in 2011.

It may be just a coincidence, but the iPad was also the last new hardware
device that Steve Jobs launched. It is definitely true that Jobs was a
proponent of the i prefix because the man who thought of it says so.

In 2006, Apple gave one of its rare sneak peeks into the future when it
showed off what was to become its television set-top box. At the time, it
was called "iTV" - but not for long.


The UK's Independent Television (ITV) network objected and the box was
ultimately released as the Apple TV. At the time, ITV had been running in
Britain for just over five decades, so it would have had no difficulty
proving prior use in any legal case.

Apple has a tradition of not especially caring whether anyone else is
already using a name it wants. For the iPad, it may later have spent years
in litigation protecting the name iPad, for instance, but at the start it
just bought the name from Fujitsu.

Or so much more recently that it's not clear whether this has been resolved
or not, there is the case of the Apple Vision Pro. Before that can launch
in China, Apple is going to have to find a way to settle a trademark fight
over the name.

"There might be marketing experts who say Apple would be crazy to drop the
prefix - it's still in front of some of the greatest brands ever," says
Segall, "but it can't be protected, and for too long there have been
companies with 'i' internet-connected things, and that's an issue for
Apple, known for innovation."

He does also acknowledge that Apple may now be more risk averse over
changing names, like the way it dropped "PowerBook" in 2006 and replaced it
with MacBook. Being so much larger a company now, and therefore with the
potential for more jobs to be lost if things goes wrong, Apple may prefer
to play safe.

But then there is also the fact that the iPhone is the single most
successful product in history. Apple could change the name, but it would
need a reason and just not being as enamored of the letter i as it has
before, isn't going to cut it.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/05/20/how-apple-has-steadily-been-dropping-the-i-from-its-devices-for-over-a-decade