This week we saw Apple announce a whole new range of devices on a live stream. And, like the last few, it wasn’t all that exciting. Which is probably why Apple decided to include an easter egg in its video supercut of the event. You know, so everyone HAS to watch the whole supercut (uploaded later that day) in search of it. Sneaky.
A Redditor found the anomaly in Apple’s keynote supercut video — an odd frame that appears just quickly enough to go unnoticed. It appears for a fraction of a second around the 1:23 mark. It shows a blue screen akin to the Windows BSOD (blue screen of death) you get when all systems fail. The screen appears right after the speaker says: “…the best-selling PC.” How fitting?
Eggception
Apple’s no newbie when it comes to adding easter eggs into its software/hardware. Interestingly, Steve Jobs prohibited any easter eggs being added when he was at the helm. After his death, Apple continued to add them to products and keynotes. Almost like a child continuing the game they’re not allowed to play when mom’s home, yeah?
Nevertheless, this ominous blue screen (that you’ll miss if you don’t scroll through the video frame-by-frame) displays a fake error code, “Error 09102019”. Which is the date of the keynote, obvs. It continues to say: “This is just a thought. But it might be nice to have some sort of easter egg message in here for the hard core Apple fans that will stop the video,” followed by a series of binary code.
01010011 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01110010 01100001 01101110 01110011 01101100 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00111111 00100000
01010111 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110
We’re gonna make this easy on you and just publish the decoded binary. If you’re really interested, you can feed it into a binary-to-ascii converter (like this one). Or if you’re a show-off you can decode it yourself.
So this is essentially an easter egg hidden within an easter egg, hence: eggception. Here is the full message from Apple hidden in the binary:
“So you took the time to translate this? We love you.”
