AdvertisementAppleOpinionWorld Opinion
David DodwellOutside InMy love-hate relationship with Apple as an Android user
As Apple marks 50 years amid market and political pressures, the company has inspired jealousy but also admiration for what it has achieved
3-MIN READ3-MIN
Last week, on April 1 to be exact, Apple reached the grand old age of 50 (almost exactly a year younger than Microsoft), one of a tiny proportion of S&P-listed companies that have stayed the course for half a century. It is a company with which I have had a special connection and a love-hate relationship for most of my adult life.
Not that I have ever owned an Apple product (I have always been a loyal Android man) nor any Apple shares; heavens, I wish I had. No. My special connection is more quirky and personal. Almost every day of my teenage life, I walked into my school’s morning assembly under a shadow that influenced us both: the signature of Isaac Newton, mischievously carved into a granite windowsill at the eastern end of our old school hall.
While my connection to Newton’s apple was a simple accident of geography, Steve Jobs’ connection was not. Apparently, Apple’s original logo, designed by co-founder Ronald Wayne, comprised a detailed drawing of Newton lying underneath the apple tree.
Advertisement
It was not until a year later that the now-iconic Apple logo, designed by Rob Janoff, was created. Minimalist and memorable, with the “bite” apparently added to make clear it’s an apple rather than as a “punny” allusion to a byte. The rainbow colours were apparently a reference to Apple computers being the only ones at the time to show images in colour.
I sometimes also wonder whether Apple’s famous (some would say infamous in the face of mounting regulatory anti-competition concerns) “walled garden” of interconnected and proprietary products and services was inspired by Newton’s life in the Woolsthorpe Manor garden – safe, private, secure, a self-contained world meeting all needs.Advertisement
Both Jobs and Newton appear to have had much in common: obsessive, perfectionist, cantankerous, abrasive to the point of rudeness, intimidating – visionaries famously difficult to work with, but who fundamentally disrupted their fields; complex men living in complicated ages.
AdvertisementSelect VoiceSelect Speed0.8×0.9×1.0x1.1×1.2×1.5×1.75x1.00x