Have you ever seen, or heard about, Apple’s pirate flag? The famous Apple Jolly Roger is one of the most curious symbols in Apple’s history. And behind this skull with the Apple logo in its eye there’s a fun anecdote that tells us about the spirit of the original Macintosh, and about how Apple understood creativity in the 1980s.
Apple Pirate Flag: from a Steve Jobs motto to an icon of Apple culture
As Andy Hertzfeld explains, a member of the original Macintosh development team, it all started with a Steve Jobs saying that’s almost legendary now: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” With it, he wanted to make it clear that the Macintosh team had to think differently, move fast, and act freely—like a small, bold, independent crew inside a company that was growing at full speed and becoming more and more like the navy: a big bureaucratic structure.
The Mac group had started out as a “skunkworks”, almost hidden inside Apple. But by 1983 they were already more than 80 people and needed to move to a larger building, across the street: Bandley 3. From the outside, the building was identical to the rest of the campus, and the team felt they should do something to make it feel more like their own, and to keep that “pirate” spirit from fading away.
That’s where programmer Steve Capps came in, with an idea as simple as it was brilliant: if they were pirates, the new “ship” where the Macintosh crew lived had to have its own pirate flag. A few days before the move, Capps bought black cloth, sewed a large flag, and asked designer Susan Kare—the mind behind many of the icons on the first original Mac—to paint a classic skull and crossbones on it. The final touch that would turn it into an icon was that, instead of a simple patch, the right eye carried Apple’s rainbow logo.
How the Apple Pirate Flag was born
The plan was for the flag to already be flying on the first Monday morning, when the whole team arrived at their new home for the first time. On Sunday night, around 22:00, Capps climbed up to the roof while a few colleagues acted as lookouts on the ground, keeping an eye out in case a guard showed up. After several failed attempts to simply drape the fabric over the rooftop, he found a metal pipe inside the building that could serve as a mast, along with a few old nails, and with that he secured the mast into a slot in the roof.
And so, the next day, everyone came to work to find a huge skull with the Apple logo in its eye crowning Bandley 3. Everyone found it hilarious, including Steve Jobs (who in 1998 saved a family’s Christmas), and they decided to leave the flag there indefinitely, in full view of everyone, as a daily reminder that they were still “the pirate ship” of the campus.
At least until, one or two months later, the flag mysteriously disappeared. It turned out that the Lisa team, with whom they had a friendly rivalry, had “kidnapped” it and even sent a ransom note. Several members of the Mac group showed up at the Lisa building to get it back, and Capps ended up literally wrestling and snatching it out of the hands of a secretary who was hiding it in her desk.
Apparently, the flag returned to the roof it belonged on and kept flying for more than a year; it even appeared in a magazine or two during the Macintosh launch. Until one day, it vanished forever.
Apple Pirate Flag: from a rebellious symbol to an everlasting Apple icon
Over time, the pirate flag even made its way into the company’s own software. In the 1990s, a small hidden video on some System 7.1 disks showed a pirate flag in the background—a friendly nod to that era when everything was still to be done, and the Mac was still the small “ship” on campus.
What’s interesting is that the Apple Pirate Flag didn’t remain just an 80s memory. From time to time, Apple has brought it back into the spotlight to celebrate special moments. In 2016, for example, a modern version of the flag flew once again over the Cupertino headquarters, reminding the world of that little chapter of creative rebellion that’s part of the company’s DNA.
And to this day, Susan Kare herself still creates these pirate flags by hand—small works of art that sell for several thousand dollars to collectors and very devoted fans.
So, when we see that skull with the Apple logo in its eye, we’ll remember that the Macintosh was born from a small pirate ship ready to conquer the world from Cupertino—and to make computing far more approachable, visual, and fun than anyone imagined back then.
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