Gallery: In Search of the Coolest Apple T-Shirt

By Lonnie Lazar (3:30 pm, Sep 25 2009)

The beloved Dogcow Moof! t-shirt from RedLightRunner is now a rarity.

It’s always a little dicey doing a “Best of” Apple t-shirts post because the really, truly best Apple t-shirts have always been the limited edition, short-run t-shirts that Apple prints up for employees and other associates, the ones Guy Kawasaki wrote about in his 1990 book, “The Macintosh Way.” In it he draws a flow chart depicting Apple’s process for making great products and the first step is: Order t-shirt.

In fact, there’s a whole book on the subject, by Gordon Thygeson – “Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer” – with 1000s of pictures of such shirts from over the years.

However, for those of us not lucky enough to get our bods into one of these rare and memorable pieces of Apple attire, there are a number of outlets in the US and the UK (and probably elsewhere as well) where you can pick up some cool threads and show the world where your allegiances lie.

Hit the jump for a gallery of 10 we think are worth checking out.

Last January we wrote about FastMac’s 25th anniversary of the Mac t-shirts, and the homage to Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commericial (pictured above) remains among the coolest Apple Ts we’ve seen out there. It’s still a 100% cotton bargain at $9.99.

Cafepress is a successful US-based DIY swagmaker with a few Apple-oriented designers on the roster, one of which, Bird Doctor, features a pretty cool nod to Leopard’s “Spaces” functionality. It’s a little pricey at $21.99 but still obscure enough that none of your PC using friends will have any idea what it means.

There are quite a few options out there for “Power On” symbol t-shirts, but the one we like best is by another Cafepress operator, Thread Yourself. These come in many different colors and styles of shirt as well as in a choice of six different colors for the symbol itself. About $25.

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About the author

Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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Posted in 25 Years of Mac, Advertising, Apple, Clothing, Macintosh |

Nik
The link to the threadyourself site (underneath the power button shirt) is broken. It’s missing the “s”
http://cultofmac.com Lonnie Lazar
Fixed. Thanks, Nik.
Dale
Steve Jobs for president
http://www.insanelygreattees.com/shirt/president
ChuckEye
Cowdog? Methinks you mean the beloved Dogcow, Clarus (TN31). (And yes, I have that shirt…)
Joshua
BEHOLD!!
http://63.134.213.17/_media/imgs/articles2/a96820_p2.jpg
haineux
The best T shirt ever worn by Apple engineers is this one:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zisa/449899852/
Naturally, there is a saga to go with it.
It seems that a LONG time before System 7.5, the engineer for the Sound Manager wrote a technical note, or gave a talk, and in the process proclaimed, “The Sound Manager sucks. I am sorry. I’m fixing it.”
Rich Siegel, proprietor of BBEdit, took this to heart, and later announced that “BBEdit. It doesn’t suck.” He eventually registered that as a trademark, and still uses it today.
So when System 7.5 was wrapping up, one of the senior engineers, known for his cranky, abrasive nature, came up with the “Sucks Less” slogan. Being a brash Apple engineer, he called a local T shirt place, and was wearing a shirt in a day or two, and passing out copies to the other engineers he thought were most deserving — people who really did make the Mac OS “suck less.” Soon, he had to run a second batch, and a cranky tester suggested the slogan on the back — “We’ve upped our standards. Up yours.”
Well, naturally, this shirt went over VERY poorly with the marketing team, who were aghast that the engineers of the company would not thing that System 7.5 was “Insanely Great” or something like that. I myself got hassled a bunch of times. I’d patiently explain the idea to the marketers, and eventually point them at the originator, who quite enjoyed defending himself.
One of the marketing guys really took it to heart, so when we did System 7.6, the theme was to make the Mac OS suck less. In marketing terms, though, that translated to “Security, Speed, and Stability.” It was, actually, a surprisingly well-selling and well-loved release, even though it meant the end of the road for some older machines. (Snow Leopard reminds me of that release a lot.)
The interesting thing is that the slogan always went over well with the True Believers at MacWorld Expo, who all seemed to assume that we were referring to Windows, and in that respect, it was quite an understatement. Windows 95 had really captivated the world, because it was the first time Microsoft had produced a coherent, top-to-bottom, operating system PRODUCT, but it was riddled with trillions of bugs, billions of compatibility problems, and, most importantly to the Mac crowd, it looked like utter crap. Jaggy fonts, garish colors, and ridiculous error messages.
And, of course, the Registry, which really should have killed Microsoft. It’s a testament to their engineers that they managed to improve it to the point where it’s almost not a problem any more.
No, sorry, there are no more “Sucks Less” shirts available. They were all gone within a month of the printing. I have mine, carefully preserved, and wear it on special hacker occasions, such as Macworld Expo and WWDC.
I myself designed a dozen or so engineer shirts, but none of them has the power of “SUCKS LESS.”
http://kootenaymac.ca dave livingston
Hi, you wrote about it being hard to obtain shirts shown in the book â€œApple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computerâ€, well over the years I have collected a dozen of the shirts in the Apple T-Shirt Book along with about 100 Apple store employee promo and launch shirts and they are for sale at http://kootenaymac.blogspot.com
the shirts from the book can be seen at http://kootenaymac.blogspot.com/search/label/Apple%20T-shirt%20book
http://islandinthenet.com KhÃ¼rt Williams
I bought one for myself, my son and my daughter: http://www.insanelygreattees.com/shirt/imamac
anon
Correction! None of your friends using Windows, will know what spaces shirt means.
Anna
“System 7.5 sucks less, we’ve upgraded our standards – up yours” is one of my all time favorites too. Occasionally I just have to wear it at work – and you’d be surprised how often I hear “what’s System 7.5?” when wearing it.
None of the other old skool (or newer) shirts have the same effect.
Other shirts that would have the high coolness factor… well – WWDC staff shirt no doubt. (What would be more appropriate to wear for Windows 7 launch event? Or just any occasion…)
Or perhaps G4 – National Security Risk, or a long sleeved Newton developer shirt, or the Jaguar release shirt.. (took me nearly 7 years to get one:) or the classic Apple Staff shirts.
Some shirts in my huge Apple shirt pile were so used they were falling apart. The Moof shirt listed on that top 10 was among them
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zisa/538876050/