9to5Mac reports that Apple seriously considered some alternative names for its now-iconic smartphone before settling on iPhone for the 2007 release.

Ken Segall, Apple’s legendary creative director who coined the “Think Different” tagline and came up with the iEverything nomenclature, gave a presentation at the University of Arizona yesterday in which he discussed the iPhone naming process.

Here are the four other names the company seriously considered, proving that even really smart people can have terrible ideas.

iPad

This of course did become an Apple product eventually and there were many iTampon jokes when Steve Jobs first announced this name. Then we all got over the name and started salivating about what tablet computing could do for our pornography consumption.

Mobi

Get it? It’s like mobile but shorter. Kids these days are always shortening words to be cool, and Mobi could have played into that. Unfortunately, olds wouldn’t have groked the conc’ so they didn’t go with Mo’ (yes, I just shortened Mobi).

Telepod

This one kind of made sense at the time. Remember that back in 2007 Apple’s biggest moneymaker was the iPod mp3 player. Telepod would have been a contraction of telephone and iPod. It all sounded a bit too Jetsons, though.

Tripod

This one, I’m afraid, is just unforgivably bad. Really? The Tripod? It’s a phone, not a stinkin’ camera stand! The iPhone was originally marketed as a phone, media player and “internet communication device” — which is a dumb way of saying it was a tiny computer. Take these three functions and add “pod” to the end — because why not? — and we could have ended up with kids asking their parents for Apple Tripods. Jesus, what a dystopian world that would have been. Thank god everyone came to their senses and just called the damn thing the iPhone, like everyone knew they would.

Ugh, Tripod? Wow.

9to5MacApple