Steve Jobs and the upside down Apple logo

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.