Before Rob Janoff designed the Apple logo, Apple had a different one. The original Apple Computer logo, designed by co-founder Ronald Wayne in 1976, was an elaborate engraving depicting Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree, surrounded by a ribbon with a William Wordsworth quote: "Newton... a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought... alone." It was the kind of logo you might find on an academic journal. Steve Jobs found it "too ornate and intellectual." He commissioned a redesign.
Janoff was 26 years old and working at the advertising firm Regis McKenna when he got the job. Jobs was explicit about one thing: the logo should not look like a cherry. The apple shape was the entire concept — the company was named Apple Computer, the fruit was the mark. But a simple apple silhouette looked too much like a cherry. Something had to distinguish it.
The Functional Explanation
Janoff has given the same answer in virtually every interview over the last four decades, and he's clear about it: the bite was for scale.
Without the bite, a small, smooth apple silhouette at certain sizes — particularly the small sizes common on early computer products — looked indistinguishable from a cherry. The bite introduced a distinctive shape element that communicated "apple" regardless of size or color. It also added a sense of visual tension, a deliberate incompleteness that the eye finds more engaging than a perfectly round shape.
There was also a practical concern about the apple being confused with a tomato. Tomatoes are roughly the same round-with-stem shape. The bite removed that ambiguity. Whether you're looking at the logo at 4mm on a keyboard key or at 4 feet on a billboard, the bitten apple reads as an apple.
The Alan Turing Theory — Beautiful, Persistent, and Wrong
There is a story that has circulated since at least the 1980s: that the bitten apple is a tribute to Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer science pioneer who died in 1954 after eating an apple believed to have been laced with cyanide. The story is that Jobs or Janoff designed the bite as a deliberate reference to Turing's death and his contributions to computing.
It's a wonderful story. It connects the most iconic technology company logo to the tragic death of the person many consider the father of modern computing. It gives the bite profound meaning: a bite taken out of knowledge, a tribute to a mind destroyed by persecution.
It is also, by every available account, not true.
Janoff has directly denied it multiple times, most clearly in a 2011 interview: "It is a fabulous story. I don't know if Steve had that in mind or not. If he did, he never told me. I just did it for the reason I gave — for scale." Jobs, before his death, was asked the same question and gave a similar answer: he wished the story were true, but it wasn't a deliberate design decision.
This doesn't stop the story from resurfacing. It recirculates reliably every few years, particularly around Pride events (Turing was gay and chemically castrated by the British government as punishment — a historical injustice formally acknowledged by the UK government's 2013 royal pardon). The story keeps coming back because it's the kind of meaning people want the logo to have.
The Rainbow Logo That Preceded the Monochrome
The apple bite gets most of the attention, but the original color treatment is equally remarkable. From 1977 to 1998 — twenty-one years — the Apple logo was a six-color striped apple: green at the top, then yellow, orange, red, purple, blue at the bottom. The stripes didn't follow the natural color gradient of an apple. They were deliberately out of order.
The rainbow logo appeared on every Apple product during the company's most formative period: the Apple II, the Macintosh, the first iMac design. The colors were chosen by Janoff partly to reflect the Apple II's ability to display color — a significant feature in 1977. They were also, in Janoff's words, "to make the logo more accessible and colorful, and to prove that Apple computers produced color."
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and began redesigning the company's product line with Jonathan Ive, the rainbow logo was retired in favor of a monochrome apple — initially aqua/translucent, then chrome, then matte. The shift aligned with the new industrial design language: cleaner, more minimal, more premium.
The rainbow Apple logo has developed a secondary cultural significance that Apple never planned for. As a symbol of LGBTQ+ identity, the rainbow logo — predating its intentional use in that context — has been adopted and reclaimed in ways entirely separate from its original purpose as a color demonstration for a 1977 home computer.
Trademark Note
Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer, Inc.) holds U.S. trademark registrations for the apple design mark in multiple international classes covering computers, software, consumer electronics, retail store services, and entertainment services. The mark is registered both in color and in monochrome form. The trade dress of the Apple logo — its specific proportions and the distinctive bite angle — is protected as a design mark. Apple's aggressive trademark enforcement extends globally: the company has pursued trademark disputes against businesses using apple imagery in contexts ranging from a Welsh grocery store to a Polish electronics retailer. The current registered design mark dates its use in commerce to 1977.