For the last couple of days Olga and I are cultivating all sorts of ideas about Apple’s logo. Why is it an apple and why is it a bitten apple. I finally got bored with thinking about it all the time and decided to Google it up. It turned out that were weren’t that far from the truth and there does indeed seem to be a connection with Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Edem.
The paragraph from The Apple Musium article says:
The first Apple logo was designed by Ron Wayne, co-founder of Apple Computer. It was rather a picture than a logo. It showed Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath the famous Apple tree thinking about gravity.
It was only used for the Apple I. Steve Jobs felt that it was too intellectual and it was almost impossible to put on computers as one could only recognize the details of the drawing when it was large enough.
Therefore, in 1977 Jobs asked the art designer Rob Janoff to design the new Apple logo. The new logo had a simple shape of an Apple, bitten into, with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. The bite symbolized knowlegde (in the bible the apple was the fruit of the tree of knowledge) and the bite could also be pronounced “byte”, a reference to computer technology.
When Jean Louis Gassée was asked about his thoughts to the Apple logo he answered: “One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.”
In 1997, Steve Jobs decided to drop the multi-colored Apple logo and replace it by a solid-colored logo. The first Apple computers to feature the new logo were the new PowerBook G3s in 1998 (although they still featured both types of logos).
There is also an interesting discussion here, which, among other things, provides the link to the first version of Apple’s logo.
