Curious Apple fans believe they’ve found a ‘hidden meaning’ in the tech company’s iconic fruit-shaped logo, and it’s a tough one to argue with.
Apple has well and truly won the logo lottery with its brand recognition these days. Even a literal apple – the fruit – with a bite out of it is enough to bring to mind the business behind the iPhone.
No matter what language you speak, chances are you’ll recognize the Apple logo – but is it just an apple, or is there more to it?
The iconic Apple logo features on most of the company’s devices (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Lots of logos have hidden meanings to them, and in a post on TikTok user @therealoshow drew attention to an apparent meaning behind the iconic Apple logo.
In his video, he pointed to the chunk that’s missing from the apple, as if a bite has been taken out of it.
Put this into tech-terms, however, and ‘bite’ could actually be spelled ‘byte’. As in, a unit of data.
The TikToker isn’t the only one to share this theory, with other users on Twitter taking to the platform to spread the word.
“Did you know that bitten Apple logo was indeed a smart punning on words ‘bite’ and ‘byte’ (to lend a geeky flavor to the fruit) ?,” one Twitter user wrote.
Other users have been left impressed by the ‘meaning’, with one person responding: “Interesting! That’s some good tech info. Thanks bro.”
But while the ‘bite/byte’ connection is a good theory, the man behind the logo has admitted that it actually doesn’t hold any weight.
Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo, spoke about the design in an interview with Creative Bits, during which he was asked whether the logo held a reference to a ‘byte’, or potentially draw inspiration from the biblical story of Eve biting into forbidden fruit.
The interviewer also asked if the fruit was a reference to ‘the discovery of gravity by Newton when an apple fell on his head while sitting under the tree’.
Lots of good ideas, but Janoff dismissed them all.
Rob Janoff has denied claims about the logo (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
He said: “They are really interesting, but I’m afraid it didn’t have a thing to do with it. From a designer’s point of view and you probably experienced this, one of the big phenomena is having the experience of designing a logo for whatever reasons you design it, and years later you find out supposedly why you did certain things. And, they are all BS.
“It’s a wonderful urban legend. Somebody starts it and then people go “oh yeah, that must be it”.”
So there you have it. The Apple logo doesn’t hold reference to a ‘byte’ – but you can understand why people think it would.