![]() ![]() “So basically, I hacked it in when no one was looking … I sort of did a gambit there.” The gambit paid off, with the chime eventually becoming so iconic that Apple obtained a rare audio trademark. In fact, his colleagues thought the change was a bad idea. “No one tasked me with this I did it because I knew it needed to be fixed,” he recalled. He came up with it because he hated the previous start-up sound, which he likened to a dentist’s drill. ![]() Reekes developed the sound in the early ’90s, during Apple’s Steve Jobs–less era, when the company was producing dozens of different computer models. Because tablets are always on, and “wake up” more than “boot up,” having a start-up chime doesn’t make much sense anymore. “I caught a comment from Tim Cook the other day that made it very clear that he thinks your iPad Pro is so good you wouldn’t need a PC,” he recalled. Part of the reason, he asserted, was because of Apple’s push to replace traditional computers with tablets like the iPad Pro. “Apple has been adrift for a few years,” he told me on the phone yesterday. ![]() Jim Reekes, the man who created the sound while working at Apple, isn’t surprised. New MacBooks, as was announced at an event last week, automatically boot up when their lid is opened - and do it so quickly that the start-up sound has been removed from the system. The chime that rings out whenever your MacBook or iMac (or PowerBook or Power Mac or Quadra) restarts, letting everyone around you know, “Yes, I own an Apple computer,” is on its way out, after nearly two decades defining the Mac experience. One of the most recognizable sounds on the planet is going away. ![]()
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