So why is the Apple logo a bitten apple? What is it, a thorough study of marketers or someone’s joke? To find out, you need to go back to the roots.
How did it all start?
The first Apple logo was quite unusual: it depicted Isaac Newton sitting next to a tree. An apple was also present here, it hung on an apple tree, and was surrounded by a kind of halo. So it’s not surprising that the company soon wanted to change its logo. This was taken up by the then popular designer Rob Yanov, who took the task entrusted to him with all seriousness.
Yanov began to collaborate with the young Jobs. He said that it is necessary to change the symbol in any case, because this will help attract the attention of people. After lengthy discussions, it was decided that the symbol of the company would be an apple. It should be monochrome, and its right side should be bitten. Jobs was enthusiastic about the idea, but insisted that the apple be multi-colored. Yanov had to work hard to dissuade the young genius from this undertaking. He argued his point of view simply: in order to make such an Apple logo, you need a lot of printing ink, which is very expensive.
But Jobs was unshakable, he was convinced that he was right. He believed that the colorful symbol would have a positive impact on the popularity of the company, the beginning of which was, to put it mildly, not very successful. As a result, the founder of the company won, and the colored apple was the symbol of Apple until 1998, when the apple nevertheless became black and white.
Why is an apple bitten?
And now a few words about who exactly "bite" the apple. Most believe that it is a symbol of the tree of knowledge that prompted Newton to discover it. But there is another version: Jobs was just playing with words, associating "bite" with "byte" (in other words, bite and byte).
The third version tells that Yanov cut out a piece of fruit, because it really looked like a tomato. But this is all secondary, since the most popular explanation, which is talked about by all the media on the planet, says that a bitten fruit is a Turing apple. Who does not know, this is a pioneer in the field of computers, whose work is of great importance, since all research on artificial intelligence was (and is) based on it.
"The Bitten Turing Apple"
Turing is famous for being one of the first to design and build a computer. Things were going well for him until the moment when his apartment was robbed. As it turned out, the robber was an acquaintance of Turing’s lover. Next was the trial, where Alan had two options:
- Go to jail for two years (homosexuality was not welcome in those days).
- Agree to castration.
The man was inclined to the second option, but in June 1954 he committed suicide by biting an apple with potassium cyanide. When it was discovered, a bitten apple was lying next to it.
Conclusion
Such is the history of the Apple logo. Of course, after the death of Jobs, there is no one to tell about how it really was. Nevertheless, the logo performed its direct duty perfectly well – it firmly settled in people’s memory. It is used in films, in Internet jokes, and we ourselves, having bitten an apple, often jokingly notice: “Oh, look, Apple!".