What the ‘i’ in iPhone and other Apple products stands for
Phone users have been wondering what the ‘i’ stands for in iPhone.
Apple has long used the class of i before its products, including iPod, iPad, and iMac.
The single letter has been taken for granted, but some online users have given various explanations as to what the brand’s lowercase signature could represent, with some suggesting information, intelligence or even individual.
Before his death in 2011, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revealed what the elusive letter meant.
He explained that the ‘i’ in fact signified the internet, access to which was the primary purpose of a computer when Apple’s first iMac came on the market in 1998, prior to which its predecessors were named Macintosh.
Launching his game-changing product, Jobs explained: ‘An iMac comes from the marriage of the excitement of the internet with the simplicity of Macintosh.
But he added: ‘i also means some other things to us. We are a personal computer company in all this. The product is born to network. It is also a beautiful stand alone product.’
But Jobs later elaborated on the subsequent meaning of ‘i’ – which has since been applied to the name of nearly all of Apple’s products.
As rivals caught up on the internet front, Apple’s USP shifted elsewhere and the i began to represent several new concepts.
According to Jobs, these were Apple’s core missions: individual, instruct, inform, and inspire.
However, he suggested the letter i before products also has another more personal meaning for consumers.
It can refer to the first-person pronoun ‘I’, an allusion to the products being one’s personal property and an essential companion – after all, who leaves the house without their phone these days?
Finally, i can also mean instruction – a reference to the educational aspect of Apple’s portfolio and how the user instructs devices to do what they want (or maybe with the advent of AI, vice versa!)
The letter i was not just used as a marketing moniker either. Apple also uses it for job titles.
In fact, Jobs himself became iCEO of Apple in 1997, with the i in this case representing interim.
The first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007, in the US.
It came out in the UK in November 2007, with an estimated 30,000 sold on the first day alone.
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