The Apple logo is a plain fruit silhouette with a piece missing. It has survived a company that changed its name, its products and its colours. Almost everything people repeat about why it looks that way is folklore, and the folklore is the interesting part.
Key takeaways
- Apple's first logo, in 1976, was an ink drawing of Isaac Newton under a tree, credited to co-founder Ronald Wayne.
- Rob Janoff drew the bitten apple in 1977 and has said the bite was there for scale, not as a pun.
- The Turing and byte stories are folklore the company never authored, and never had to.
- Through four redesigns the silhouette never moved. That constant is what a trademark actually protects.
- Apple holds 279 marks published in Nepal's bulletins, filed directly, because Nepal is outside the Madrid System.
- Roughly three in five published Nepali marks are a name filed together with a device.
- A materially redesigned logo is a different mark, so plan a fresh application when you rebrand.
Where did the first Apple logo come from?
From a pen. The 1976 original was a detailed ink illustration of Isaac Newton reading under a tree, with an apple about to fall, wrapped in a ribbon carrying the company name.
It is credited to Ronald Wayne, the third co-founder, and it looks like what it was: a woodcut-style drawing made by somebody in a hurry.
As a picture it is charming. As a mark it was unusable.
Why did it last barely a year?
Because a logo has two jobs, and that one could only do the first. It could sit on a manual. It could not sit on a circuit board, a shop sign or a screen.
Shrink it and the tree, the ribbon and Newton himself collapse into grey texture. Detail is the enemy of a mark.
That lesson has nothing to do with Apple. It is why big brands redesign at all.
Who drew the bitten apple?
Rob Janoff, then an art director at the Regis McKenna agency, produced it in 1977 for a young computer company nobody had heard of.
The result is one shape, one cut and nothing else. No type, no border, no scene.
It reads at the size of a fingernail, which is the whole point, and it has outlasted every product it was drawn for.
Why is there a bite?
Janoff has explained it in interviews as a problem of scale: without the bite, a plain round fruit reads as a cherry or a tomato.
The bite is not decoration. It is a legibility fix that turned into the most recognisable feature of the mark.
That is a useful order of events for anyone designing a brand. The memorable part came out of solving a practical problem.
Is the Turing story true?
There is no evidence for it, and Janoff has said he had not heard of Alan Turing when he drew the mark.
He has made a second point that settles the colour version too: the striped logo appeared before the rainbow pride flag, so it cannot have been referencing it.
The story survives anyway, because it is a better story. That tells you something real about brands: meaning attaches to a mark whether or not the owner put it there.
Why did the stripes disappear?
The coloured version is widely reported to have signalled that the Apple II could display colour, which was worth saying in 1977 and worth nothing twenty years later.
From the late 1990s the mark went to a single colour, and it has since been rendered in glass, chrome and flat finishes.
Every one of those is the same outline. Only the surface changed.
Is Apple's logo on Nepal's register?
Yes, extensively. As of our latest bulletin import, Apple Inc. has 279 marks published in Nepal's Industrial Property Bulletins, spread across 19 NICE classes.
A little over half of them sit in Class 9, the technology goods class. Others cover retail, telecommunications, software services, watches and more.
Many are individual icons filed as marks in their own right, which is exactly the behaviour this article is about. You can see them for yourself in our trademark search.
Why did Apple have to file here at all?
Because a foreign registration has no force in Nepal. Sec. 21B of the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act 1965 says so plainly, and Nepal is outside the Madrid System.
So the most valuable brand in the world files at the Department of Industry the same way a Biratnagar bakery does, class by class.
Sec. 18A requires a separate application for each class, which is why one company ends up with hundreds of entries.
A foreign applicant also acts through a Nepali agent appointed by a notarised power of attorney. There is no way to do this from abroad without one.
How many other Nepali marks say "apple"?
Around 368, owned by businesses with no connection to the computer company. Most are food and drink: apple-flavoured products from distilleries and dairies.
They coexist because they sit in different classes and sell to people who will never confuse the two.
That is the ordinary state of a register. One word, many owners, separated by what each of them actually sells.
It also shows why an identical-word search proves very little on its own. The class and the goods wording decide whether two entries are really in each other's way.
What does Nepal's register say about logos generally?
More than you would guess. Each bulletin entry records whether the mark is a word, a device, or both.
| Kind of mark | Published entries | What it means for a redesign |
|---|---|---|
| Word and label | About 45,400 | The name and the device are registered together |
| Word only | About 23,300 | A visual refresh changes nothing on the register |
| Label only | About 2,900 | The image is the whole mark, so any change matters |
So roughly three in five published Nepali marks tie a name to a device. If that is your registration, redrawing the device is not a cosmetic decision.
Does a redesigned logo need a new application?
Often, yes. A trademark application is filed with specimens of the mark under Sec. 17, and what the registration certificate covers is the mark as filed.
A new colourway or a slightly cleaner curve will usually still be the same mark. A new symbol, a new arrangement or a dropped word element usually is not.
Nobody can settle that from a blog post. Ask the DoI or an advocate before you assume an old registration still covers a new identity.
The safe habit during a rebrand is to keep using the registered version somewhere while the new filing is pending. Sec. 18C allows cancellation of a mark not put to use.
What happened when two Apples met?
Apple Corps, the Beatles' company, and Apple Computer were in and out of dispute from 1978. Both had a good claim to the word, in different worlds.
A 1991 agreement drew a line: computers on one side, music on the other. It was a sensible settlement for the businesses as they then were.
Then the computer company started selling music. Apple Corps said the line had been crossed.
In May 2006 the High Court in London found no breach, and in February 2007 the two settled: Apple Inc. took ownership of the Apple trademarks and licensed certain of them back.
The company had dropped "Computer" from its name a month earlier, which tells you how completely the 1991 line had stopped describing it.
What is the lesson for a Nepali business?
A coexistence drawn around what you sell today can be crossed by what you sell in three years, and the register will not move with you.
So file the classes you are growing into, not only the one you trade in now. The NICE class finder is a quick way to map them.
Nepal is first-to-file, so the neighbouring class you meant to add later may be gone when you get there.
Can a famous logo block you even without a Nepali filing?
Yes. The DoI has protected well-known marks across classes: it refused a local VIRGIN application on 12 June 2023, and ruled the same way in the Holiday Inn Express opposition on 10 July 2023.
So a global name is risky here even where the owner has not registered in your class.
Search the name with no class filter before you commit. Our search and clearance service weighs sound, look and meaning together.
What does the Act count as a trademark?
Sec. 2(c) defines a trademark as a "word, symbol, or picture or a combination thereof" used to distinguish one business's goods or services from another's. A logo sits squarely inside that.
Sec. 16 gives title on registration, and Sec. 18 lets the DoI refuse a mark that damages another mark's goodwill or is already registered to somebody else.
Sec. 18B adds a rule people break without noticing: a mark may not be used as a registered trademark until it has been registered.
How do you file a logo in Nepal?
The route is the same for a device mark as for a word mark, and the order matters more than the paperwork.
- Fix the artwork. Decide whether you are filing the symbol alone, the name alone, or the two as one mark.
- Prove you own it. Get the design transferred in writing from the designer or agency before you file.
- Search first. Check the word and the image, in the classes you sell in and the ones nearby.
- Pick the classes. Nepal uses the 45-class NICE Classification maintained by WIPO, with one application per class under Sec. 18A.
- File at the DoI with the prescribed form and specimens of the mark.
- Answer the examiner if a conflict or distinctiveness point is raised.
- Watch publication. The mark appears in the Industrial Property Bulletin and an opposition window opens; DoI practice allows 90 days.
- Renew it. Registration runs seven years, and the renewal term is another seven.
An unopposed application commonly runs 12 to 14 months, and 6 to 8 months in the smoothest cases. Treat both as typical, not promised.
Our step-by-step guide to registering a logo as a trademark covers the documents in detail.
Common mistakes
- Filing the logo and forgetting the name. A combined mark may not protect the word used on its own.
- Assuming the designer's work is yours. Without a written transfer, ownership can sit with whoever drew it.
- Rebranding quietly. A materially new logo can leave your registration pointing at something you no longer use.
- Chasing cleverness. A hidden meaning is fun to read about but does nothing for registrability.
- Believing use alone is enough.An unregistered logo is much harder to defend here.
- Filing one class and stopping. Growth into a second class is a second application.
A worked example
This is an illustration, not a real case. A Pokhara coffee roaster registered a combined mark in Class 30 in its first year: a hand-drawn cup with the roastery's name curved around it.
Five years on, it drops the cup for an abstract mountain glyph and shortens the name. It also opens a café.
Both halves of the old registration have now moved. The device is unrecognisable and the word is different, so the register no longer describes the business.
The sensible answer is a fresh application for the new mark, a second one in Class 43 for the café, and the old registration kept alive until the new ones are through.
In short
Apple's logo is famous for a reason that has nothing to do with the stories people tell about it. It is one shape, it works at any size, and it has not really changed in nearly fifty years.
The trademark lesson is the constancy, not the cleverness: register the thing you will still be using, in the classes you will grow into, and file again when it genuinely changes.
Explore the free tools, or let our team register your logo at the DoI.
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Only the Department of Industry decides what your registration covers, and the statutory text is published by the Nepal Law Commission. If you are redesigning and are not sure whether your filing still fits, send us the old and new artwork.
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