Last week, I tweeted a pic showing an old Apple laptop. As was the case with all old Mac laptops, the Apple logo was upside down when open.
With a bit of help from Sérgio Miranda, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to learn more.
From the linked Joe Moreno blog post:
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.
An interesting problem, one of competing interests. Should the user see the right side up logo, so they know which side to open? Or is it more important for the brand that the world see a right side up logo?
Obviously, Steve started with one opinion and then, when he returned to Apple, he flipped his decision. Possibly driven by shows that started putting stickers over the logo so the Apple would look “right” on screen.
Interesting bit of Apple history.
File this under the obvious response: “You’re holding it wrong.”
I think the person in the comments who says they’ve owned a MBP for 3 years and still tries to open it from the wrong end is full of it. I cannot imagine that it would take any human longer than a few times for their brain to wire the synapses in such a way that they would know which end to open it from. I imagine that if this story is true that the people who were testing it did not perform adequate testing to see if people would easily adjust to the orientation.
If you didn’t see an Apple logo on a Mac laptop in a tv show, it was because Apple hadn’t paid product-placement fees to that show.
Yep. You’ll almost never see actual products on screen, or the logos are “artfully” to a greater or lesser extent, covered.
“Back in the days” when creative professionals were the biggest Apple Evangelists, rumor had it that Apple never paid a dime for product placements, but that the products were placed by the show creators …
When allowed to by network reps. Before product placement became the budget-funding equivalent of incentivized asset forfeiture.
Unless they’re paid for, in which case you’ll see, say, Dell computers and monitors everywhere‚ even in entirely different scene locations.
To name just one show that made me laugh at the uniformity, that is.
True. It is still the case in the vast majority of instances where you see Apple products. If you watch the end credits of a show or movie, you may see, “Promotional consideration provided by….” If you see Apple listed, they paid $$ or, more likely, gave product for the placement.