Apple pips Apple

An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but two 'Apples' in the same earthly bushel can create some rotten vibes.

An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but two 'Apples' in the same earthly bushel can create some rotten vibes. The Beatles had set up Apple Corp in 1968 during a phase in their career when they thought that being four superstars would lead to the next stage of creative bliss: fostering and producing talent (remember Grapefruit or the Elastic Oz Band? No?) that would not be under any corporate diktat. As things turned out, the Beatles were far better musicians than businessmen and Apple Corp. went bust — until the label was resurrected in the late Eighties for use on Beatles CDs.

HT Image

In 1976, however, two over-the-moptops from California started their personal computer company called ‘Apple’. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak decided on a logo inspired by ‘Isaac Newton’s apple’ — although a munched specimen. The name and the logo of the Beatles’ ‘Apple’, on the other hand, had been inspired by a painting by the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte, that Paul McCartney had bought. Be that as it may, the Beatles’ Apple Corp. had struck an out-of-court deal with the two Steves in 1981 by which the latter would stick to the business of computers while the former to music. Everything was swell — except for a hiccup in 1991 when music files started to be stored in Apple computers — until Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod, a media device that stores and plays music, in 2001.

McCartney and Ringo Starr and the estate of John Lennon and George Harrison went to court (for the third time) in 2003 stating that Apple had violated the earlier arrangement. This week the court judged in favour of Apple, the computer company. Which just goes to show that the Beatles’ idea of Apple Corp. being “a kind of western communism” became a sort of scrounging exercise, as all ‘hippie’ things do after a point.