I was talking about when Apple originally came about, not Apple today.
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.
You might as well say the same argument about Snapchat Inc. who is now known as Snap. Even more generic than 'Apple' as it is used as a verb, adjective and now a company name which appears at the top of the Google search results despite the founders launching their company as Snapchat Inc.
From a SEO point of view, The transition of 'New Vector' -> 'Element' is just as bad since the continuity of the name is completely lost and has to compete again in the SEO rankings.
The thing is with very generic names in search engines and word of mouth, continuity is essential and the creators of Riot have to rebuild it again with a generic name.
Element is a new chat app that people won't have heard of and thus does need to be explained, and the "Element" name isn't helping in that regard because it's extremely generic and has nothing to do with messaging. Even worse, it has bad name collision problems; I just Googled "element app" and all the results are other apps named Element, including one hosted at elementapp.com (which will seem like a more legitimate domain name to many casual users than element.io).