The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Implications of Apple Logos (2025-08-04)

The original logo of apple computer, in many ways the total antithesis to the later rainbow-style macintosh logo and its eventual plain white successor in common use today. Quoted from the Apple-1 Operation Manual in the Bitsavers.org (apple) collection at the internet archive. Accessed 24 august 2024.

Much to my annoyance, I cannot yet relocate the source of a critique of the apple computer logo as referring to the judeo-christian bible and the chapter according to which Eve ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and thereby supposedly sentenced humanity to mortality and the need to work for a living, and women to agonizing childbirth. This story never made much sense to me and sounds suspiciously garbled, but as many of us have learned either passively by overhearing it or directly by somebody teaching it, supposedly the fruit in question was an apple. The reasons this was unlikely to be the fruit referenced by the original storyteller and the ongoing argument and efforts to trace how and why apples got dragged into it later on is outside of the remit of this thoughtpiece, though quite instructive about ancient fruit varieties, languages, and cultural warfare. Since apple computer is a united states corporation founded in a context where "the bible" and a sort of "greatest hits" subset of its most illustratable stories for puerile audiences are part of the cultural water everyone is swimming or drowning in, I can't see any plausible argument to counter the critique. Even though the critique also strikes me as a bit overwrought, considering what apple computer has developed into and the wildly different original logo, I must concede the point is nevertheless a sticky one.

Why does the critique strike me as overwrought, whether fairly or not? Well, I admit to being rather charmed by the original notion of "apple" deriving from the shorthand for "application," "APPL." Truth be told, so I don't think it would have occurred to me to use it as an actual designation for any sort of machine. Twenty years or so ago, such things seemed clever rather than an active effort to slip something by us. That of course, is a "seemingness" from a less cynical, or at least more naïve time for me. Now it irritates me constantly to hear large language models referred to as "thinking" or "hallucinating" in an effort to persuade investors these things are intelligent and so should have billions of dollars spent on them. The trick is simply too obvious now, and so even the idea of "apple" being something of a clever joke or pun meant to help with branding and advertising does not have the same entertainment value it once did. Master of marketing on the cheap as apple computer has long been, the more homespun tenor of some of the earlier iterations certainly hasn't held up.

Today at least, the original apple computer logo would never make it to the drafting table. No, today logos are not allowed to be so elaborate. Unlike earlier days when part of the point was to make them more difficult to copy and reproduce, now they must be reduced to the simplest forms possible to ease clear reproduction at multiple sizes. Hence finding logos that still feature more than two letters or a slogan of any kind at least in the anglophone mainstream is quite difficult. Even the most slow to change university logos, with their origins in stylized heraldry and therefore meant to have multiple elements each with their own meaningful details, have been reduced to versions that look suspiciously like they were designed for redrawing with a large felt marker. In the apparent management mania for ever thinner and flatter devices and visuals, apple has even abandoned the slight extra line once used to imply three-dimensionality in its modern monochrome logo. But I suppose it would also scandalize a marketing department now to include the banner line added to the original apple logo, which reads, "Newton... 'A mind forever voyaging strange seas of thought... alone.'" I doubt any marketing professional would go along with using such a tag line, with its overtones of melancholy. (Drawn from William Wordsworth's poem The Prelude according to cultofmac.) No, no, no. Can't have possible customers associating the product with loneliness or exploration of any kind. Far better to guide them toward seeing getting the product as a way to be part of a crowd in which everyone has to have their own apple computer to fit in.

The black and white Newton logo was designed by original apple computer cofounder Ron Wayne, on deliberately old fashioned lines. He did a brief interview with motherboard in june 2017, and gamely put up with a question about whether he has any "regrets" that he sold his original stake in the company among others of that ilk. His explanation of how he came to sketch the logo is far more interesting, and makes quite clear he knew his design was very much counter to the trends of the time. I suppose in his own way he was following through on the positioning of apple computers as part of the counter-culture and a challenge to the infamous ibm and burgeoning but still brand new microsoft.

I have bumped into a rather grim (and somehow very united statesian sounding) theory that the subsequent apple logo was a reference to the fate of Alan Turing, widely believed to have committed suicide by eating an apple laced with prussic acid. The 1977 rainbow logo was created by designer Rob Janoff when the company was shifting retrenching in preparation for the release of a new model, which included a colour screen that Steve Jobs understandably wanted to show off. According to cultofmac, "Janoff added the bite in the apple to give it a sense of scale when reproduced at different sizes. (It was also a play on the word 'byte.') The colorful stripes showed off the Apple II's big feature, while embracing the countercultural tenor of the times." As always, the real story turns out to be quite mundane – and it is worth noting as well that information about Alan Turing, his contributions to the development of computers and his death were little-known outside military-oriented circles until the early 1980s.

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