I’m a Mac user. I love the Mac experience, after having suffered Windows desktops and laptops almost all my life. (PS: I’m also an Android user when it comes to phones. I cannot stand the iPhone).
But one thing I have always wondered about Macs is why the Apple logo is inverted, on the cover? It is inverted to you, the user. I usually end up trying to open it from the wrong side, thanks to this logo’s placement!
A few days after getting my first Mac, the 11″ MacBook Air, in 2013, I figured out why by being curious enough to search for it!
The first time this was spoken about was in December 2011, by Ken Segall, who worked with Steve Jobs as ad agency creative director for 12 years spanning NeXT and Apple, and also led the team behind Apple’s iconic Think different campaign.
His blog post doesn’t exist anymore, but .
Ken says,
During one of our agency’s regularly scheduled marketing meetings with Steve, he asked for our advice on what he felt was a conundrum.
Which was more important — to make the logo look right to the owner before the PowerBook was opened, or to have it look right to the rest of the world when the machine was in use?
Look around today and the answer is pretty obvious. Every laptop on earth has a logo that’s right-side up when the machine is opened. Back then, it wasn’t so obvious, probably because laptops were not yet ubiquitous.
So we debated the issue. There were decent arguments on both sides. It seemed like we were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t.
Remember, Steve was the guy who put the customer experience first. In the end, that was the reason he ended making the decision he did. He thought that the most important person in the equation was the one who shelled out good money to buy the product in the first place.
It was only when later PowerBook models were designed that Steve reconsidered and decided the logo should face the world right-side up. That one fleeting moment of pleasure for the owner started to feel tiny in comparison.
Looking back, it borders on the unbelievable that something so wrong could ever have seemed right. That Steve Jobs ever wrestled with this decision only proves one thing: being right in retrospect is much easier than being right in real time.
The second perspective was from , a former senior web app engineer and marketer at Apple, who explained this in 2012.
Joe says,
About a dozen years ago we had some discussions at Apple about the placement of the logo on the back of Apple’s laptops. As you can see in this Sex and the City scene, the Apple logo is upside down when the lid is opened.
Apple has an internal system called Can We Talk? where any employee can raise questions on most any subject. So we asked, “Why is the Apple logo upside down on laptops when the lid is open?”
We were told by the Apple design group, which takes human interface issues very seriously, that they had studied the placement of the logo and discovered a problem. If the Apple logo was placed such that it was right side up when the lid was opened then it ended up being upside down when the lid was closed, from the point of view of the user. (If you’re currently using an Apple laptop made in the past eight years then close the lid and you’ll see that the Apple logo will be upside down from your point of view, but right side up when opened)
Why was upside down from the user’s perspective an issue? Because the design group noticed that users constantly tried to open the laptop from the wrong end. Steve Jobs always focused on providing the best possible user experience and believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the onlooker.
Obviously, after a few years, Steve reversed his decision.
Opening a laptop from the wrong end is a self-correcting problem that only lasts a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely.
So, it looks like Jobs had the user’s perspective as the top priority when he decided this first. But he was eventually forced to choose brand marketing over user experience!
This is actually a fantastic conundrum that can be argued from both directions (pun intended).
My argument would look at the product usage itself. I, as a user, am using the laptop actively when it is on. I can sort the inconvenience of trying to open it wrongly by perhaps adding a sticker towards the opening side. Or even Apple could add something else more subtle towards that effect (though they haven’t, or couldn’t be bothered with it, I presume).
But once I open it and am using it actively, I do not get to see the logo on the other side. At that point, I’m seeing the screen. And the world is seeing only the outside. And now, I, the user and the brand are both marketing the brand tacitly (me, proclaiming that I have made this choice, and Apple, proclaiming that they have yet another user who invested in their product). This is accentuated when the product is being given as props in TV shows (or to news channels; this is a very common tie-up that happens, and I have experienced some of the background detailing while having Lenovo as a client at Text 100). So, for most of the product’s life, only the world gets to see the outside cover and hence it makes perfect sense to prioritize what they see to place the logo.
But, as I said, this could be argued from the other direction as well and that may sound convincing too!
PS: You must read about when he found that the logo is ‘downside up’ (the inspiration behind this post’s title!). It’s hilariously laborious 🙂