Hidden Mac Easter Eggs (2023)

There are secret messages and fun images hidden throughout macOS.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some hidden Easter eggs on your Mac. 
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So Easter eggs, of course, are hidden little fun things in software and operating systems that really don't do anything but they are just neat to know they are there. It shows that there is somebody else with a good sense of fun on the other end building these things for us. Now gone are the days where there was a hidden game of Breakout in macOS and eMax was installed so you could run it in Terminal and access all the Easter eggs in eMax. A lot of the old Easter eggs are gone. But there are a bunch of hidden things even in macOS Ventura. 
First let's take a look at what happens when you download a large file and have to wait for it to download. What's the date on that file before it is actually complete. Well, let's try it here with this file. I'm going to download the linked file and I'm going to Save it in my Downloads folder. Then I'm going to look in my Downloads folder and you can see the download is progressing. If I select it while the download is in progress and use Command i, I see that the credit date is January 24, 1984. This will be the created date for any file you're in the middle of downloading. That's the date of the original presentation where Steve Jobs announced the Macintosh. 
Now let's go into System Settings and then down to Users & Groups. Then if you change the icon that you use for the User you can go to Suggestions and you'll recognize some of these. They have been around for a long time. They are little standard icons that you can use. One of them is of a vinyl record right here. Now it is hard to see here but we can locate this file in the system. If you're in the Finder and you do Go, to the Computer Level, then to your Drive, then to Library and then down to User Pictures, this one is under Instruments and it's Turntable. If we double click to open this up it will open up on Preview. We can zoom in and see the names of the songs on this record. These are all words that Steve Jobs like to use. Magic, Revolution, Boom, Unbelievable, and then there is a little Made in California and an Apple logo. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and introduced the iMac there was a whole new advertising campaign called Think Different and had this speech, that you probably know as the Crazy Ones. That used to be in the TextEdit icon. But it is not there anymore. As a matter of fact it used to be in several different places. But you can still find it in a few. 
If you go to System Settings and then go down to Displays you could see the icons here for showing you how text will look at different resolutions includes the text for the Crazy Ones. But you can also find this hidden in an emoji character. If you use Control Command Space or fn and E and you search for Book you come up with several here. But there is one that you can see has some text on it. Let's choose that one. It will gives you this little book character. Take that one and make it as large as you can. If you look closely you can see it says Here's to the Crazy Ones and it's got the beginning of that little piece of ad copy. 
Now the thing about emoji characters are there's an international board called the Unicode Consortium that decides which new emoji characters get added so that everybody is on the same page. Apple, Microsoft, Goggle, and all sorts of different companies that use different emoji characters. But each company is in charge of creating the art work for its own version of that. That's why the little book icon there has that text on it but it is only on Apple devices. You're not going to find that text say on the Microsoft or Goggle version of the book. 
Another one where Apple has inserted a little Easter egg in their version is if you look for coin and insert the coin character and then you'll see here the Crazy Ones and it's got the year 2020 which is the year that Apple designed this emoji. 
Now the Emoji & Special Character viewer has an Easter egg of its own. If you bring that up and you search for the word Clarus you get a dog and a cow. Actually if you search for moof you get a dog and a cow too. What do dogs and cows have in common with those words. Well go to the Wikipedia page for dogcow and you'll find a little history of this special symbol named DogCow or Clarus but there is a lot to read about Clarus the dogcow in Apple history here and you may recognize it because if you had an old Mac, back in the 80's or 90's, if you went to Page Setup this was the image that was used to show you the orientation of the page that you were going to print. Most people just saw it there and never really thought much about it. But it actually is quite an interesting read here. 
But it's not the only place you'll see Clarus the dogcow because after a long time of not being anywhere in macOS, in macOS Ventura Clarus the dogcow is back. If you go to an app that has File, Page Setup, not just Print but has to have Page Setup then you can use Page Setup and there it is. It's back again with a slightly new design. 
Now a lot of Apple icons used to have Easter eggs. There was the TextEdit icon, the Mail icon had some interesting stuff on it. Lot of other little things as well. But most of those are gone. One that still has a kind of neat Easter egg is a fairly new icon and that's the one of Voice Memos. If you look at that icon there you'll see a wave form. What's that waveform. Well, that the waveform you get if you say the word Apple. 
There's another icon that has a special Easter egg on it and I'm going to use Shift Command G and then go to this path here. Going into System Library, Core Services, CoreTypes dot bundle, Contents Resources. You're going to get to a Directory that has all sorts of icons for different things. Like, for instance, it's got icons for all these different Mac computers here and other devices that maybe hooked up to your network. But what if you're not hooked up to a Mac. What if your network has a PC on it. Well, then it is going to use this icon here. The public generic PC icon. What does that one look like? Well, it looks like a really old CRT Screen and what's on it? The Blue Screen of Death. The windows aroscreen that you would get when windows crashes. 
Now back in Safari let's say I wanted to read this Wikipedia page about Dogcow. Again one thing I may want to do is go to Bookmarks and say, Add To My Reading List. Now when I want to see my reading list I go to View and then Show Sidebar. In the Sidebar here I have different modes, like tabs at the top and some modes down here, Bookmarks, Reading List, Shared With You, and iCloud Tabs. Reading List has an icon. The icon for Reading List is a pair of glasses. But if you look at the style of glasses you notice that they are Steve Jobs' glasses. 
Now back in the Finder let's use Shift Command G to go to another location. This time in System Library, Image Capture, Devices and then Virtual Scanner dot app Contents and Resources. Go in there. You're met with a bunch of files that have to do with Image Capture. All these files look pretty normal except there are two odd ones in here. One is a simpledoc.pdf. It is a pdf here that has a bitcoin white paper. What's that doing there? Well, no-one really knows for sure but it has been around since around 2018. Most likely it was just a convenient document that happens to be completely open without copyright. So it is probably used for some utility in the app as a sample pdf. But a little stranger than that is a cover dot jpeg image that is a picture of this which people have traced to a spot on Treasure Island in San Francisco. No one really knows why it is included as an image there. But if you ever need a sample image and you've got nothing else on your Mac you can always, I guess, use this to play around with in Preview or other graphic's apps. 
So I always say hope you found this useful but not this time because none of this stuff is useful. It is just fun.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Hidden Mac Easter Eggs (2023)”

Brian A. Foster

2 years ago

Thank you for being fun instead of "useful" for a bit. Old school Macintosh adopters always had a bit of a fun and daring spirit, as exemplified by pirates!

Elizabeth

This was fun!

Shana

I have found that many of my files show a very weird creation date, especially in my documents folder— it’s 1969. Is that an Easter Egg or is there something seriously wrong with my system?

Gary Rosenzweig

Shana: That's just what shows when the creation date isn't there or is set to 0 (Unix Time 0).

Tim Woolmer

Back in the day I read a very long discussion on uunet about Dogcow and Moof. I think it became its own usenet discussion group.

thomas

12 months ago

I recall when Apple had created a seperate division in its corporate structure that focused on software creation. It's name was Claris. I suppose the dogcow, Clarus was an oblique reference to that entitiy.

Comments Closed.

Hidden Mac Easter Eggs (2023)

Comments: 6 Responses to “Hidden Mac Easter Eggs (2023)”

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