Have you noticed that advertisements for any Apple product always has the time set at 9:41?
No? Well, neither had I. But if you go back through the archives, you’ll notice that any advert bears that specific time – although it didn’t always.
If you don’t believe me, quickly go to the tech giant’s website and take a look, I’m not lying.
Despite there being literally hundreds of Apple products released since Steve Jobs decided to set the time on every product to 9:41, which began in 2010, when the first iPad was released, few people have clocked it.
But before we get into that, let’s talk about when Jobs first decided to set an on-device time displaying across the board – that was 9:42.
We saw it first when the original iPhone was unveiled on January 9, 2007, and the reason for the time being set at 9:42 was because that was the actual time when Jobs announced the iPhone to the world.
It has since gone down in history as one of the most influential reveals in the tech industry.
Former senior vice president of iOS Software at Apple, Steve Forstall, spoke in-depth about it with blogger and developer Jon Manning back in 2010.
“We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation,” Forstall apparently explained.
“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.”
It was then changed to 9:41 around the time of the first iPad, as mentioned before.
But things are a little bit looser now for the tech giant, as Apple now tending to release video productions of their new products, so the timing doesn’t overly matter anymore.
But Jobs’ legacy lives on through the on-device timing of 9:41.
This is just one of a host of things people didn’t really know about Apple.
Including the fact that in 10 years, the company has spent $10 billion trying to get its secretive and now-scrapped car project, named Titan, off the ground and into the consumer’s hands.
But it just wasn’t meant to be.
While it isn’t exactly clear why the company decided to ditch the product in early 2024, they did internally tell the 2,000 employees that were working on it that it was being discontinued.
