Apple prides itself on the quality of its industrial design; every Apple product must look just so, or Jonathan Ive will be very upset indeed. So how did Apple end up selling a lot of laptops with an upside down logo?
Apple’s laptops currently sell with an Apple Logo on the lid with the leaf of the apple pointing towards the user — this means that when opened, the Apple logo appears the “right way around” to anyone passing by. But it wasn’t always that way; Apple used to sell its laptops with the Apple logo the other way around. Why go that way? According to former Apple designer Joe Moreno, it was a matter of being user, rather than onlooker focused:
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 focuses 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 for a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely.
[Joe Moreno via Wired]