The Raskin Center

How the Macintosh Got Its Name — and Who Created the Project

December 8, 2025

In the fall of 1979, a 36-year-old Apple employee named Jef Raskin began writing a series of internal memos proposing a new kind of personal computer. He called it the Macintosh — a deliberate misspelling of McIntosh, his favorite variety of apple.

The memos were specific. The computer should cost under $1,000. It should be small enough to sit on a desk without dominating it. It should come with software already installed. It should have no user-serviceable parts. And it should be so easy to use that a person who had never touched a computer could learn to use it in minutes, without reading a manual.

This was the Macintosh project. Raskin wrote it, proposed it, and spent the next two years building the team that would pursue it. He was not doing this in response to anything he had seen at Xerox PARC — that visit came later. He was doing it because he had spent years thinking about the relationship between computers and the people who used them, and he had arrived at specific conclusions about what a computer ought to be.

Who Was Jef Raskin?

Raskin joined Apple Computer in January 1978 as employee number 31. His official title was Manager of Publications — he was hired to fix Apple’s documentation, which was notoriously poor. But Raskin was not primarily a documentation person. He had a PhD from UC San Diego, had taught computer science, art, and music at UCSD, and had been interested in human-computer interaction since the early days of the field.

Before Apple, Raskin had run a small company called Information Appliance, Inc. The name was deliberate. He believed that computers would eventually become as ubiquitous and as easy to use as household appliances — that the complexity and expertise required to operate them in the late 1970s was not an inherent property of computers but a failure of design. He wanted to build the appliance that proved this.

At Apple, he spent his first year improving the manuals. But he was also thinking, and writing. By 1979 his thinking had coalesced into something concrete enough to propose.

The Design Memo

Raskin’s foundational Macintosh memo, written in late 1979, laid out the project with unusual specificity. Most product proposals of this kind are vague — they describe a general direction and defer specifics to engineering. Raskin’s memo was the opposite. It specified the price ($500 at first, then revised to $1000), the form factor (self-contained, with screen and keyboard integrated), the software approach (built-in, no separate applications to install), and the interface philosophy.

On the interface, the memo was explicit: the computer should require no prior computing experience to use. This was not a goal that most computer designers of the era considered achievable, let alone worth pursuing. The dominant assumption was that computers were complex tools that required training. Raskin thought the complexity was the designers’ problem, not the users'.

The memo also addressed what would now be called the unboxing experience. The computer should work the moment you turned it on. There should be nothing to configure. The user should be able to begin working within minutes of opening the box.

These ideas were not widely shared in the personal computer industry of 1979. The Apple II — Apple’s successful product at the time — required users to type commands, manage floppy disks, and understand a fair amount about how the machine worked. The IBM PC, which would arrive in 1981, would be even more demanding. Raskin was proposing something categorically different.

The Name

The name “Macintosh” came from Raskin’s personal life. He had long been partial to the McIntosh apple variety — sweet, crisp, and widely available in the northeastern United States where he had grown up. When he needed a code name for the project, he used it, with a deliberate change in spelling to avoid a potential trademark conflict with McIntosh Laboratory, a manufacturer of high-end audio equipment.

The name stuck. When the project became public and eventually commercial, the spelling remained — “Macintosh,” not “McIntosh.” Every Mac sold since 1984 carries a name that Jef Raskin chose because he liked a particular variety of apple.

Building the Team

Raskin’s memo convinced Apple management to let him pursue the project. He was given a small budget and the go-ahead to hire a team. His first significant hire was Brian Howard, an engineer. He also recruited Joanna Hoffman, who would later become one of the Mac’s key marketing leads.

The project operated as a small, somewhat independent effort within Apple — not a priority for the company, which was focused on the Apple III and the Lisa. This relative obscurity was, in some respects, an advantage. Raskin’s team could pursue their ideas without the interference that came with being a flagship project.

By 1980 the team had grown to include Burrell Smith, who designed the original Mac motherboard — an extraordinary piece of engineering that delivered far more performance than the budget should have allowed. Smith’s design would become the foundation of the finished Mac.

What Happened Next

In 1981, Steve Jobs was removed from the Lisa project following conflicts with that team’s management. He looked around for something else to lead. He found the Macintosh project.

Jobs’s arrival transformed the project in almost every dimension: resources, team size, urgency, and ambition. It also changed the relationship between Raskin’s original vision and the machine being built. The tensions between the two men over design decisions — particularly over the interface, the hardware, and the price — eventually led to Raskin’s departure from the project in 1981. He continued as a consultant to Apple until 1984.

The Mac that shipped in January 1984, at the famous “1984” Super Bowl commercial, was a different machine from the one Raskin had proposed. It was more powerful, more expensive, and more Jobs’s vision than Raskin’s. But it was built on Raskin’s foundation — his team, his name, and his core conviction that a computer could be genuinely easy to use.

Raskin described his feelings about this history in his essay “Holes in the Histories”, which argues that the standard account of the Mac’s creation systematically omits his role. He was careful to acknowledge Jobs’s contribution while insisting on accuracy about who created the project and what it was originally.

Documented Sources

The history on this page draws from:

Part of the Jef Raskin and the Macintosh series.