All rights reserved.Your Mac’s startup sound depends on volume level your Mac was set to when it shuts down. by Joel Beckerman with Tyler Gray to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 21, 2014. It’s synonymous with the entire product experience.Įxcerpt from The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. It had to project the Apple brand personality, and because of consistent use over generations of the product, the sound is a lasting symbol of Apple’s “think different” philosophy. Jim innately understood that this particular sound was a strategic imperative-it wasn’t just a tactical decision. No matter what Apple innovations come up, the start-up sound stays mostly the same and brings its customers the same satisfying bong when they first turn on their new Macs. Only minor tweaks have been made, despite numerous operating system and feature alterations, lots of new hardware, and tons of icon and font changes.
That sound has remained essentially unchanged since then.
“It’s like a logo, you don’t keep changing it! Change isn’t bad, it’s just that it needs to be better.” Although no one has definite proof of this, Jim believes Steve Jobs himself finally fended off any alterations to it when he came back to Apple in 1996. Lots of people at Apple subsequently tried to change Jim’s start-up sound, he says, and he always argued against it. “That’s exactly what I was trying to do!” “I’m like, ‘Exactly! Victory!’ ” Reekes says. The reviewer of the machine in the now defunct computer bible Byte magazine wrote: “I knew I was in for something great when I heard it turn on.” The Macintosh Quadra 700 came out in 1991. It was a coup at a company that’s since become known for its iron grip on design. In the end, the computers shipped with Reekes’s sound. He went into the office in the wee hours, changed the code, inserted his sound, and eventually enlisted the support of one of his superiors, who looked the other way when others protested about the change. “No one would let me change it,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Reekes’s bosses told him. It’s a common reaction from people who don’t quite get the magnitude of the opportunity in sound-there are still a lot of innovative people who need convincing, even though they feel the impact of sound daily. When Reekes put it on a few of the early prototype machines, his superiors balked.
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