The name "Apple Computer"

A lot of people wonder where the name "Apple Computer" came from, as it is a rather unusal name for a computer company.
Steve Jobs came up with the name in early 1976. At the time, he was often visiting and working on a small farm friends of his owned. It was a hippie commune where Steve spent a few months of the year.
When he returned from one of those stays, he told Steve Wozniak about his idea. Jobs probably was working on apple plantages. Or he just wanted their startup to be in front of Atari in the phone book. Or it was a tribute to Apple Records, the music label of the Beatles.
Whatever the true origin of the name was, Woz knew instantly that they were going to be in trouble with Apple Records sooner or later. But as they were unable find a name that sounded better than Apple Computer, the name was chosen.
Woz's worries turned out to be justified. Apple Computer, Inc. was sued by Apple Records over trademark violations in 1989. (for more on this see below)

The Apple logo

The first Apple logo was designed by Ron Wayne, co-founder of Apple Computer. It was rather a picture than a logo. It showed Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath the famous Apple tree thinking about gravity.
It was only used for the Apple I. Steve Jobs felt that it was too intellectual and it was almost impossible to put on computers as one could only recognize the details of the drawing when it was large enough.
Therefore, in 1977 Jobs asked the art designer Rob Janoff to design the new Apple logo. The new logo had a simple shape of an Apple, bitten into, with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. The bite symbolized knowlegde (in the bible the apple was the fruit of the tree of knowledge) and the bite could also be pronounced "byte", a reference to computer technology.
When Jean Louis Gassée was asked about his thoughts to the Apple logo he answered: "One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy."
In 1997, Steve Jobs decided to drop the multi-colored Apple logo and replace it by a solid-colored logo. The first Apple computers to feature the new logo were the new PowerBook G3s in 1998 (although they still featured both types of logos).

The Mac Logo

Probably the most popular logo is the Picasso-inspired Mac logo. It was designed by Tom Hughes and John Casado, art directors on the Macintosh developement team. Originally, the logo for Macintosh looked completely different and was designed by the artist Jean-Michel Folon who was payed with a royalty of $1 for every Macintosh sold (overall over 30 million). But before the release of Macintosh, Steve Jobs changed his mind and had it replaced by the simple and colorful drawing of Hughes and Casado.
The "Picasso"-logo was used as welcoming message on all versions of the Mac system software until System 7.6.1, where for the first time the Mac Face logo was used instead. With the release of MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar) the happy Mac and Mac Face logo at startup were replaced by a grey Apple on a white background.

The Dogcow

The famous Dogcow has become a legend within the Apple community.
It was originally created by Susan Kare and was included in the Cairo font, which shipped with the original Macintosh. When the Cairo font was discontinued soon thereafter, the Dogcow moved to the LaserWriter driver 4.0 and became the Apple Developer Technical Support's (DTS) mascot.
The Dogcow's name is Clarus, she is a female and her cry is Moof! (.au file). Before October 1987, it was unclear what exactly the Dogcow was. However, when asked whether it was a dog or a cow, Scott Zimmerman spontaneously replied that it was both - a Dogcow, "a special genetic hybrid."
The Dogcow could be found in all versions of the Macintosh operating system until MacOS X. It was used in the Print Setup options panel. The usage of the Dogcow there was not just a joke by some developer, but was rather ingenious, because with just one picture, options like inverted image or larger printing area could be explained.
In late 1980s, the Dogcow became more and more popular and was used by other developer groups. It went even that far, that Microsoft used the Dogcow in one of their advertisements.
In order to stop the misuse of the Dogcow, Mark Johnson and Mark Harlan of the DTS came up with the idea to write a Technial Note about the Dogcow: the famous Technical Note #31. Originally, this technical note was intended to be an April Fool's joke and was included in the April issue of Apple's monthly developer mailing list. The response to this technical note was overwhelmingly positive. Later, the Technical Note #31 was also included on the first few Apple Developer CDs as an easter-egg (only accessible with a special key combination).
Apple later registered a trademark for Dogcow and Moof!.

The "Pink" project

In 1988, the OS developers at Apple had just fnished working on System 6. In order to determine what the future of the MacOS should look like, all developers had a meeting discussing new concepts. They wrote down their ideas on index cards. Ideas that could easily be integrated into the existing System Software were written on blue cards and the more difficult and time-consuming concepts were written on pink cards.
The "Pink" project was born, competing with the System 7 (codenamed "Blue") team. It was a project for a new microkernel-based object-oriented operating system. Soon, the competition between the Pink and the Blue project was so intense, that each side suspected the other to steal ideas (the System 7 team was nick-named "Blue Meanies"). Since the developement of Pink was very slow and was way behind System 7, Apple decided to cancel the Pink project in 1991. Pink was then spun out into a joint venture with IBM, called Taligent, but was discontinued soon thereafter.

The system sound "Sosumi"

In 1981, Apple Records had granted Apple Computer the permission to use the name Apple for products not related to music in any way.
However, with the release of the Apple //gs, Apple released a computer that was able to play and record digital music.
In 1989, Apple Records sued Apple Computer. At that time Apple was developing System 7. System 7 included the new system sounds and the ability to record new sounds via microphone. Jim Reekes, who was in charge of the system sounds, re-named one system sound from "Xylophone" to "Sosumi" which was pronounced so-sue-me. To avoid more legal problems he told Apple's legal department that "Sosumi" was Japanese.

Carl Sagan

The original codename of the Power Macintosh 7100 was Carl Sagan. However, the codename was changed twice before the introduction of Power Macintosh 7100.
It was changed after the real Carl Sagan, a physicist (astronomer), sued Apple in 1994 for using his name without permission. Besides that he didn't want his name to be commercially used his name was grouped with two discredited scientific discoveries, Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion, codenames of Power Macintosh 6100 and 8100. The codename was changed to BHA (= Butt Head Astronomer), but when Apple's lawyers felt that this codename could cause more legal trouble, the engineers changed it to LAW (= Lawyers Are Wimps).

Apple VS Apple

When Steve Jobs came up with the idea of calling their new company Apple, both he and Wozniak knew that once things would get big, they'd get legal trouble with Apple Corps., the record company of the Beatles. In 1981, Apple Computer and Apple Corps. signed an agreement, allowing Apple Computer to use the name for products not related to music in any way. Part of this secret agreement was a payment of rumored $80,000 by Apple Computer.
However, the peace between the two companies wouldn't last long. In 1989, Apple Corps. sued Apple Computer over trademark violations, claming that the Apple //gs and other products (such as CD drives) were violating the agreement by being able to generate synthesized music. The lawsuit was settled in 1991 with another payment by Apple Computer. But this time the sum was much higher: $26.5 million.
The next round between the two companies started in 2003. Apple Corps. sued Apple Computer again over copyright infringements. Apple's extremely successful iTunes Music Store caused this latest legal struggle for the name Apple. A judgement is yet to be spoken. However, rumors have it, that the two companies are working on another out-of-court settlement.
A never ending story?

The NewWorld ROM

With the release of iMac in 1998, Apple introduced the NewWorld Architecture also called Unified Hardware Architecture.
The new key feature was the new ROM. Ever since the introduction of the original Macintosh back in 1984, Apple's computers were equipped with a ROM on a physical chip on the logic board. Because RAM and HD space were very expensive at that time the ROM contained not only the routines required by a computer to boot, but also some higher level Mac OS code.
With the introduction of the NewWorld architecture the ROM was devided into bootROM and Mac OS ROM. The bootROM held the hardware-specific routines such as hardware knowledge, initialization and drivers and the Mac OS ROM (no longer on a physical chip, but an image file inside the MacOS system folder) contained the boot-time Mac OS routines and hardware-specific software components. Both ROMs could be updated (Firmware update).
However, since all NewWorld Apple computers had an unified ROM (with Machine Gestalt ID 406) and some types of software needed to check which Macintosh model they were being used on, each Mac had an unique machine identification.

Click here for the complete list of the NewWorld Macs' unique Machine Identifications.