apple emoji easter eggs
lorem ipsum
It’d been a while since I thought about the intricacies of Apple’s emojis, but yesterday I was reminded that the road emoji 🛣️ points to Cupertino, the city where Apple is headquartered.
This came up while I was browsing emojis to find on suitable to label my ‘plays’ page on Notion, in which I searched ‘paper’ and decided to use this rolled paper emoji 📃.
Reminded of the road emoji, I pasted the rolled paper into the Apple Notes app and Command+plus’d very many times until the emoji was big enough to be legible. Unfortunately, the text on this one was quite blurry compared to the Cupertino road sign, but on first glance it is clearly a letter to Katie.
I tried squinting and widening my eyes repeatedly, turning my head to view the letter from another angle, and even wildly shaking my head. After a solid minute ridiculously performing combination of those actions, I managed to make out the words. I quickly transcribed the note and it reads:
Dear Katie,
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.
They push the human race forward…
The letter cuts off about there.
More importantly, who in the world is Katie and who in the world is sending such an angsty, fiery, powerful letter?
To answer the latter, Steve Jobs!
To answer the former, my best guess is Katie Cotton, Apple’s former head of public relations, who ‘worked closely with Steve Jobs' (NYT 2023).
A likely incomplete list of other fun easter eggs include the receipt emoji 🧾, cash emoji 💵, ancient script emoji 📜, notes emoji 📝, and newspaper emoji 📰. The receipt is a fun play on Steve Jobs’ misfits quote, the script and notes are similar to the letter, the cash is actually a stack of ‘Cupertino’ single bills, and the newspaper is from ‘The Apple Times’ but the text seems to be the classic Lorem Ipsum placeholder text.
Happy hunting 🐣