Not sure if you’ve noticed this before, but for some reason, Apple likes to plop a 9:40-ish time on their products in ALL of their product shots (and launch presentations). Ever notice that? On the iPad, it was 9:41. On the iPhone and iPod Touch 9:42 was the time marked on the device. Don’t believe me? Check out the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch pages at Apple and let me know what you see 🙂 Strange huh? But there must be a reason, right?
Enter Jon Manning, lead developer of Secret Lab. This little puzzler has been bugging him for years, and like many of us, he wondered what the real reason for the 9:41 and 9:42 timing was. Is it some sort of inside joke? Or is there a cryptic meaning, something only his Steveness and other Apple execs are in on? Thankfully, after a trip to the Palo Alto Apple store this weekend, Jon found out the REAL reason.
On his trip, Jon noticed that Scott Forstall (Senior vice president of iPhone Software) was making an appearance in the store. Without hesitation, he stepped over to Forstall and asked him straight out about the numbers. Forstall kindly obliged with a straightforward answer. The conversation went a little something like this:
Scott Forstall: “We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation…When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly.”
Jon Manning: “So you add a couple of minutes?”
Scott Forstall: “Yeah! And for the iPhone, we made it 42 minutes. It turned out we were pretty accurate with that estimate, so for the iPad, we made it 41 minutes. And there you are – the secret of the magic time.”
There you have it. The secret to Apple’s ‘magic time’ revealed. Kinda makes sense, doesn’t it? 🙂
[Via: TUAW]