The strange connections between The Beatles and Apple computers
By early 1967, The Beatles were raking in the cash from hit records and songwriting royalties on an unprecedented scale. On the other hand, they were losing out on bad deals made with their publishers and record companies at the start of their careers and were being taxed heavily on earnings.
The group’s accountants advised them to shelter £2million (around £50m in today’s money) from the tax authorities by investing in a business. And so, Apple was born.
That’s not the Apple most people think of today, though. The $3 trillion big tech company was founded later, by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. This was Apple Corps, a Beatles business named after a pun on the word “core” and inspired by a painting of the fruit by Belgian surrealist René Magritte that Paul McCartney had been shown by London art dealer Robert Fraser.
In a press conference The Beatles held in May 1968 to announce the founding of their business, John Lennon described Apple Corps as “a company we’re setting up, involving records, films, and electronics.” Sound familiar? How about Apple Music (formerly iTunes), Apple Studios, Apple TV and Apple Computer?
The Fab Four were onto a winner without even realising it. As it turned out, The Beatles’ business was a failure for the most part and a major issue the group faced when it came to their break-up. The band members themselves had no experience in running a company, and their associates mismanaged the ventures the band was ploughing money into.
Apple Records bankrolled dozens of artists with little commercial return, while the Apple Studio was botched by engineer and friend of The Beatles ‘Magic’ Alex Mardas. Further renovations of the space cost an additional £1.5m before it closed its doors for good in 1975.
The Apple Boutique shop was an unmitigated disaster which closed within a year of its launch. Apple Films never took off, and Apple Electronics shut down after Mardas turned out to be a con artist incapable of putting any of his hypothetical inventions into practice.
Was ‘Magic’ Alex the original Steve Jobs?
Nevertheless, Mardas certainly had big ideas for the world of electronics almost a decade before two young computer scientists named Steve developed their first model of a personal computer. The Beatles were so impressed with ‘Magic’ Alex that they set up a company for him in 1967, which would go on to become a division of their company known as Apple Electronics.
According to Beatles biographer Barry Miles, one of the ideas for an electronic device that Mardas pitched to Lennon was a voice-activated telephone. Steve Jobs’ Apple Inc famously became the first major tech firm to release a voice-activated digital assistant when they released Siri in 2011.
But the company already had this concept in their development pipeline more than 20 years earlier, when they showcased their proposed computing system Knowledge Navigator in 1987. Still, ‘Magic’ Alex and Apple Corps got there first, a full two decades before Apple Computer shared this concept.
It should be noted that Mardas later disowned this idea, and he was fired from Apple Corps in 1969 once it became clear that he’d failed to create a working prototype for a single one of his ideas. Jobs, on the other hand, was able to put his money where his mouth was.
Apple Corps vs Apple Computer
The most obvious similarity between Apple Corps and Apple Inc, previously known as Apple Computer, is, of course, their names. The use of the name ‘Apple’ became the subject of a trademark dispute between the two companies, when The Beatles’ Apple Corps sued Jobs’ Apple Computer in 1978.
This suit led to the first of three settlements, in which Apple Computer paid out $80,000. The third settlement, in 2007, gave Apple Inc full trademark rights to the ‘Apple’ name at an eye-watering cost of $500m.
But the bizarre links to The Beatles and Apple Computer don’t stop here.
In 1967, The Beatles famously concluded their acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with an earth-shattering E major chord at the end of the album’s final track, ‘A Day in the Life’. In 1992, Apple Computer operating system developer Jim Reekes was creating a new startup sound for the company’s signature Macintosh line of computers.
“The final chord of The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’ is an amazing moment,” Reeves writes on his website, “and was a key (pun intended) inspiration for my Mac startup sound.” So anyone who’s ever felt like they’re listening to a computer starting up when they come to the end of the song has their explanation.
Meanwhile, when John Lennon agreed to take part in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus concert for British television, he went on to perform as part of a supergroup. The group’s all-star line-up featured Eric Clapton on guitar, Keith Richards on bass, and Jimi Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell. Its name? The Dirty Mac.
Not that this was a prescient dig at Apple Mac computers on behalf of The Beatles. But it certainly adds to a compelling list of coincidences linking the world’s biggest tech company to the most successful band in rock history.
