Apple turns 50: five little-known anecdotes that marked its career

Here are five little-known facts about the Cupertino, California-based company on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

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The origin of the bitten apple logo has sparked numerous rumors, from a reference to the forbidden fruit of Adam and Eve to a tribute to the poisoned apple that killed British mathematician Alan Turing.

The Apple brand owes its name to the love of apples by Steve Jobs, one of its founders.

In an interview with Forbes magazine in 2018, its creator, American graphic designer Rob Janoff, said that he only received one instruction when he was commissioned to create the logo in January 1977.

“Don’t make it pretty,” said Jobs, who wanted something simpler than the first “Apple Computer” logo, an illustration of Isaac Newton under a tree.

Janoff explains on his website that he spent two weeks studying cross sections of apples before settling on a bitten fruit.

History records Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as the co-founders of Apple.

However, a third man signed alongside them the three-page contract that launched the company on April 1, 1976: Ronald Wayne.

According to Water Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, Wayne was an engineer at the video game company Atari and was in charge of hardware engineering and documentation for the fledgling company.

But while his two co-founders threw themselves into the business, Wayne feared losing his little savings if Apple failed.

He resigned his status as co-founder 11 days later and sold his 10% stake in exchange for two payments of $800 and $1,500.

That 10% stake would have been worth about $370 billion by 2026.

In a futuristic totalitarian world, a hammer thrown by a young athlete destroys a “Big Brother” figure who declaims to indoctrinated citizens from an immense screen.

Tens of millions of Americans watched filmmaker Ridley Scott’s one-minute ad during the Super Bowl, the American football final, on January 22, 1984.

Issued alongside the announcement of the launch of the Apple computer, the ad was inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

The originality of the advertisement lies in the fact that it does not directly show the product, but rather promises a new world of emancipated consumers thanks to home computers.

Apple devices over the years have used colors to distinguish themselves from the white of their stark competitors.

The first-generation iMacs, released in 1998, had transparent cases in shades of blue, green, and other colors.

The iPod music player, initially metallic gray, diversified to encompass a whole spectrum of bright colors.

Later, the “rose gold” variant of the iPhone 6S in 2015 gave rise to a multitude of imitations, following a several-year trend dubbed “millennial pink.”

Almost all advertisements and screenshots of Apple products have one thing in common: they show the same time, 09H41. And it is not by chance.

Jon Manning, an Australian game creator, said he asked Scott Forstall, then in charge of iOS (Apple’s mobile operating system), about it in 2010.

Forstall explained that this schedule is a reference to the structure of Apple product presentation events.

“We design the presentations so that the big product reveal occurs about 40 minutes into the presentation,” Forstall said.