The Apple logo, 1976 to today: what the record shows

1976: Ronald Wayne’s Newton illustration

Apple Computer was founded as a partnership on 1 April 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who held a 10% stake. Twelve days later Wayne withdrew from the partnership, and he was later paid $800 for his share.^[2]

Wayne also drew the company’s first logo. It was a detailed, hand-drawn picture of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree inside a frame, with a ribbon banner reading “Apple Computer Co.”^[1][2] It was replaced almost immediately.^[1] The sources we checked do not record why, so this article does not guess.

1977: Rob Janoff’s striped apple

Rob Janoff joined the Palo Alto agency Regis McKenna in 1977 and was given the Apple identity. According to Janoff, the only direction from Steve Jobs was “don’t make it cute”.^[3][4]

On how he arrived at the shape, Janoff told Revert to Saved in 2011:

“I just bought a bunch of apples, put them in a bowl, and drew them for a week or so to simplify the shape.”

Rob Janoff, 2011^[5]

• The bite was there for scale, so that people would read the shape as an apple rather than a cherry.^[4] Janoff said the pun on the computer term “byte” was a coincidence pointed out to him afterwards, and he and Apple have denied that the logo refers to Alan Turing.^[4][1]
• The stripes referred to the Apple II’s ability to show colour on screen, and were meant to make the logo approachable.^[4] Regis McKenna has credited the idea of adding colour to the artist Tom Kamifuji.^[1]
• The order of the colours was mostly a matter of taste. Janoff said it had “no particular grand plan other than I liked them that way”, except that the green stripe went at the top, where the leaf is.^[5] Wikipedia also places the green stripe directly under the leaf.^[1]

1998–1999: one colour instead of six

The striped logo stayed in use until 1999. Wikipedia dates the official change to 27 August 1999, the year after the first iMac, citing Apple’s website on that day: the rainbow scheme was dropped for single-colour logos that were nearly identical in shape. Some Apple products from 1998 already carried different colour variants.^[1]

2000s: glossy renderings of the same shape

Apple introduced the Aqua interface at Macworld in San Francisco in January 2000. Presenting it, Steve Jobs said “one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it”.^[7]

Apple’s marketing also used rendered versions of the logo in this period. Wikipedia, citing a compilation of Apple artwork, dates an Aqua-themed version to “1997 until 2003” and a glass-themed version to 2007–2013.^[1] Those ranges come from a secondary compilation rather than an Apple announcement, and the Aqua range starts before the interface itself was shown, so treat both as approximate.

2013 onward: the flat silhouette

iOS 7, announced on 10 June 2013 and released on 18 September 2013, replaced much of Apple’s textured interface with flatter icons under a design team led by Jony Ive.^[8] The end of the glass-themed logo rendering in 2013 lines up with that change.^[1] The flat, single-colour apple used since then has the same basic shape as Janoff’s 1977 drawing.^[1]

The golden-ratio diagrams

Diagrams that fit the Apple logo onto golden-ratio circles circulate widely. In a 2013 analysis for Gizmodo, David Cole found that the curves are not true circular arcs and that the measured proportions vary too much to support the claim. He quotes Janoff saying, “When I designed it I pretty much did it freehand”, and notes Janoff’s account that the agency Landor & Associates later made the shapes more symmetrical and geometric.^[6]

Typefaces used with the logo

The apple is a symbol with no lettering, so it has no font of its own. These are the typefaces Apple used beside it, with the dates given by the source.^[9]

Timeline

The archive’s Apple record lists the logo files it holds. A file’s year label in the archive describes that file; it is not a claim that Apple changed its logo in that year.