Apple logo (Rob Janoff, 1977)

The logo that Rob Janoff replaced is often overlooked. Ronald Wayne — the third Apple co-founder alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — drew the original mark in 1976. It was an ink illustration of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree, with a Wordsworth quotation running around the border. It appeared on the Apple I computer manual.

Wayne sold his ten per cent stake back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 in April 1976. The Newton drawing was dropped the following year — not primarily because of Wayne’s departure, but because the illustration was too detailed to reproduce cleanly at small sizes. The combined sale and logo change have since been framed as one of the most expensive decisions in business history: Wayne’s stake, held to today, would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

For the Apple II launch at the West Coast Computer Fair (April 1977), Jobs hired Regis McKenna Advertising in Palo Alto. Art director Rob Janoff received a brief with two constraints: signal the Apple II’s colour-display capability, and produce something that worked at small sizes. Janoff drew an apple, took a bite out of the right side to prevent it being mistaken for a cherry, and added six horizontal stripes — green, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue — chosen for visual balance rather than spectral order. The whole design took about a week.

The mark went through four major changes after that. On 27 August 1999, Apple dropped the rainbow stripes in favour of a plain monochrome silhouette — Jobs had returned as CEO two years earlier and was cutting everything to essentials. Aqua and chrome surface treatments followed with Mac OS X (2001) and the PowerBook G4, rendering the same silhouette in three-dimensional gloss. Flat treatment returned in 2013 with iOS 7. The silhouette Janoff drew in 1977 has not changed across any of these revisions.

A few precise decisions account for how the mark has lasted.

The bite. Janoff’s stated reason: distinguish the apple from a cherry at small sizes. Post-hoc explanations — Alan Turing, Genesis, the computing term “byte” — are all retrospective readings Janoff has consistently rejected in interviews. The functional reason is also the visual reason: at 16px, an unbitten apple is ambiguous; the bite makes it specific.

The leaf angle. The leaf sits offset from the bite — roughly 90° away. A centred, upright leaf would turn the apple into a near-circle. The offset keeps the silhouette legible as a fruit rather than an abstract blob.

The six-colour stripes (1977–1999). Stripes ran green, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue — not in spectral order, but in the order Janoff judged to look most balanced on the page. They signalled the Apple II’s colour-display capability and were technically difficult to reproduce consistently across print processes. Precise colour matching across seven different production vendors was a recurring problem throughout the 1980s — one practical argument for the 1999 simplification.

Silhouette stability. The mark has gone through four complete changes of surface treatment — rainbow stripes, flat monochrome, aqua glass, flat again — and remained recognisable throughout. That stability is not accidental: the apple silhouette with its bite and angled leaf is specific enough to carry meaning across any finish.

“I wanted to simplify, and by taking a bite out of the side, it prevented the apple from looking like a cherry.” — Rob Janoff, 2009