Janoff, at the Regis McKenna agency, got one instruction: don't make it cute. The bite gives scale, separating apple from cherry; the rainbow stripes demoed the Apple II's color display; the byte pun was noticed after the fact. Janoff has denied the Turing tribute in every interview, noting he had never heard of Turing, whose wartime work was still half-classified in 1977.
The Turing story is perfectly shaped: persecuted genius, poisoned apple, a rainbow that reads as the pride flag, all waiting for a company that thinks different. Janoff calls it his favorite legend, Jobs wished it were true, and Turing's own favorite childhood tale, Snow White and her poisoned apple, gets folded in.
The coroner never tested the apple by Turing's bed, and he had cyanide-emitting experiments running at home; the suicide-by-apple reading is itself a legend beneath the legend. A myth about a bite, resting on a death that may not have involved one.
When the designer denies the myth and the audience keeps it anyway, whose logo is it?