PARIS, Mar 29 (AFP): iPhone maker Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary on April 1 having marked pop culture and the tech industry like few other firms since its beginnings in 1976.
Here are five things you may not know about the history of the California giant.
Designer Rob Janoff said that Apple cofounder Steve Jobs gave him one terse instruction when he commissioned a new logo in January 1977: "don't make it cute".
"I just wanted to make the computer easy and fun to be around," Janoff told Forbes in 2018.
He included the bite mark for scale to set the apple apart from similar round fruit like cherries-learning only later it was a homonym for the computer term "byte".
And belying urban legends, there was no link to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve or the death of computing pioneer Alan Turing.
Janoff added that the Apple job was "the only time in my entire career where I presented only one solution" to a client.
"But it was just so right".
In a totalitarian sci-fi world, a hammer thrown by a young athlete smashes a "Big Brother" figure declaiming to brainwashed citizens from a vast screen.
Tens of millions of Americans saw director Ridley Scott's one-minute Apple advert during the Super Bowl on January 22, 1984.
Broadcast with an announcement of the release of the Apple computer, it was more than a little inspired by George Orwell's dystopian novel named for the year.
The ad's originality lay in the fact it did not directly show off the product, but instead promised a new world of emancipation for consumers thanks to home computers.
Apple's devices have over the years played with colour to set themselves apart from more staid competitors.
Its first-generation iMacs, released in 1998, offered transparent shells in candy-like blue, green and more-combining a pop of visual interest with a glimpse at the high tech workings within.
The iPod music player, at first available in metallic grey, quickly diversified into a whole spectrum of bright colours.
Later, the "rose gold" variant of the iPhone 6S in 2015, spawned many copycats, surfing a years-long trend dubbed "millennial pink".
