Apple's 'Happy Mac' face gets a spooky makeover for its 'Scary Fast' event

For its "scary fast" October 30 event, Apple's announcement morphs the company's logo into an ominous reworking of its famous Happy Mac icon.

The smiling Happy Mac face is now the icon for the Finder, but it has been much more. Right back with the very first model in 1984, the Mac would start up and show the happy face if everything was working correctly.

At that time, it was a quite crude black and white drawing of a Mac with a face in its "screen," and it was one of the famous icons created by artist Susan Kare.

It went through multiple designs, adding 3D and color as new versions of the Mac came out. A revamped design, much closer to the new Halloween one, was introduced with System 7.5.3 in 1996.

Left: Susan Kare's original Happy Mac. Right: the version in the dock of every Mac today

The drawing of a classic Mac was gone as the new versions showed on the screen face. For the first time, the icon was designed to show three faces, with the one looking directly out at users being joined by a character peeking in from the left, and half-blocking one from the right.

Apple accentuated the split faces by having them within a rectangle, but a line representing noses, extending above and below the line.

Over the years, that extended line vanished. Today, while it's no longer shown during the macOS Sonoma startup, the latest iteration of this 39-year-old icon is in the Dock of every Mac.