Apple's first logo, designed by Jobs and Wayne, depicts Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. Almost immediately, though, this was replaced by Rob Janoff's "rainbow Apple", the now-familiar rainbow-colored silhouette of an apple with a bite taken out of it. Janoff presented Jobs with several different monochromatic themes for the "bitten" logo, and Jobs immediately took a liking to it. While Jobs liked the logo, he insisted it be in color to humanize the company. The Apple logo was designed with a bite so that it would be recognized as an apple rather than a cherry. The colored stripes were conceived to make the logo more accessible, and to represent the fact the monitor could reproduce images in color.

Prior to the first Macintosh, Apple used a typeface called Motter Tektura alongside the Apple logo, which was designed in Austria by Othmar Motter of Vorarlberger Graphik in 1975 and distributed by Letraset - and also famously used by Reebok. The Apple logo's bite mark was originally designed to fit snugly with the Motter Tektura "a."