For a company that insists it doesn’t like to look to the past, Apple’s new Face ID logo will certainly feel familiar to longtime Mac users.
Apple debuted the new logo during its iPhone X keynote yesterday to show off the phones facial scanning features. It features a simple smiling face that looks three dimensional, but it’s actually just a repurposed version of the classic Happy Mac icon originally created by Susan Kare for the original Macintosh.
Check out the similarities:
Photo: Apple
Kare’s iconic Happy Mac logo has undergone a number of revisions since it debuted in the 1980’s. The icon was supposedly inspired partly by the Batman character Two Face. Apple originally used it to indicate that your Mac had booted up successfully. It’s now the icon for the Finder app on macOS.
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
4 responses to “Face ID logo resurrects a classic Macintosh icon”
Somebody must have had low blood sugar in the icon department that day.
Someone needs to do their homework. That’s the standard icon for “smart shutter” face detection used by pretty much EVERY camera manufacturer.
>> For a company that insists it doesn’t like to look to the past, Apple’s new Face ID logo will certainly feel familiar to longtime Mac users.
If you’re going speak about Mac history … at least research & be accurate with your information & that history.
>> The icon was supposedly inspired partly by the Batman character Two Face.
The “two faced” color icon didn’t appear until around System 7 or 8. It replaced the Happy Mac icon.
>> Apple originally used it to indicate that your Mac had booted up successfully.
Actually, no. The happy face Mac icon was an indication the Mac found a bootable hard drive & remained on the screen during boot up until the Finder was launched. Seeing your desktop was the indication that your Mac booted successfully. The happy Mac was only the beginning of successful boot up, not the completion.
If the Mac did not find a bootable drive you’d get a question mark floppy disk icon. You might also get the sad Mac icon or the Bomb icon if you’re computer had bad RAM or other more dire issues at boot up.
Emoji face targets for simple people