And for every one success story along the vein of Apple, there's hundreds of failure stories (caused by a variety of reasons). Having a good name gives you a better chance than having a bad name. You're just exhibiting survivorship/selection bias here.

And anyway, they were known as "Apple Computer" back then. See e.g. this ad: https://i.redd.it/f1o3uol6q2dx.jpg The name is not at all ambiguous. It was good branding relative to its competitors.