Apple’s one of the most iconic brands in the world, with an instantly recognizable logo that’s included on almost every product they make. But one thing people have always wondered is why there’s a bite in the logo, and that’s what I’ll explain in this article.
Back in 1997, Steve Jobs turned to an ad agency to design a simple logo that could be printed on their computers, since the original hand-drawn logo of Isaac Newton under an apple tree was a little too complicated. Rob Janoff was assigned to the project, and Jobs gave him just one request, saying, don’t make it cute.
With that in mind, Janoff began working on the logo. He decided to focus on the imagery of an apple instead of the typography, which was a different approach than other computer companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, whose logos were primarily text based.
Janoff started with a simple silhouette of an apple with a leaf on top. But this imagery was pretty ambiguous, since there are several fruits that have a round shape with leaves stemming off. Janoff pointed out that several people mistook this apple logo for a cherry, since there was no clear context for how large or small the fruit might be.
To solve these problems, Janoff added a bite, which allowed people to immediately identify the logo as an apple, while still retaining a simplistic design.
Finally, six colorful stripes were added to symbolize the Apple computer’s ability to display color images, something no other machine could do at the time.
When Janoff presented the logo, Jobs simply said, okay, that’s nice, and made it the official logo of the company.
But there’s a myth that persists to this day, that the bite taken out of Apple’s logo was a play on words, since the term bite, spelled B-Y-T-E, is used in the tech industry as a unit of memory size. Although Janoff himself admitted the rumor wasn’t true, saying, I’m afraid it didn’t have a thing to do with it. It’s just a happy coincidence.
See also: Hereās why Apple wants your old iPhone
