I always think of the end of the Beatles ‘day in the life’ when my Mac starts up. Normally leads to me requesting Siri to play Sgt Peppers.
What’s more: originally, the modern Mac startup chime we all know and love was a perfectly in tune G Major chord, introduced with the Centris/Quadra AV models from 1993 (in July, more than 30 years ago!), then it became a slightly flat G Major chord in the Power Macintosh 9500 from 1995, then it got transposed into an also slightly flat G-flat Major with the introduction of the iMac in 1998, and it finally got transposed, yet again, to a perfectly in tune F Major chord with the Intel models from 2013.
Now, A Day In The Life finishes with an E Major chord, so I wonder if there’s a secret plan inside Apple to progressively transpose the startup chime in quarter-tone increments until it also hits E Major, without Apple Corps noticing it, frog-in-the-pan-style… 🤔 Or maybe they’ll just stop short of it, or even be content with the current F Major. They do seem to mess around a lot with that important branding element, going as far as outright disabling it by default in the last few Intel MacBook models, and there’s the whole Sosumi easter egg, so it isn’t completely farfetched.
Also, if you pop open Mactracker, where it’s easy to listen to all startup chimes, and check out the 1995-1997 version (interestingly, there is a separate Macintosh_Quadra_AV_Startup.m4a chime file inside of the Resources/Chimes folder that sounds exactly the same but slightly sharper, which leads me to believe that at some point, likely when it was redesigned and lost the ability to access the dreaded – but useful – death chimes –, the app developers made a mistake and started wrongly linking the Quadra/Centris AV icons to the PCI_based_Power_Mac_Startup.m4a chime file), you’ll realize just how much crisper it sounds in comparison; it’s even more similar to A Day In The Life’s last chord in colour, and it would be nice to see it be transposed and replace the current warbly iterations. I’m also guessing Apple isn’t doing that either because they lost the files and couldn’t care less about extracting it from an old Mac ROM or asking someone in the vintage Mac community (or, duh, Mactracker’s developers for it), or because the chime could be much too crisp for MacBooks in work environments or whatever.
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