Mac Easter Eggs
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
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The “secret ROM image” text in particular seemed like it could be related to the picture shown above. I decided to dive deeper to see if I could figure out why the SCSI Manager contained these strings, in the hopes that I could solve the mystery. Would this be the clue I needed in order to figure out how to instruct the Power Mac G3 to display this picture?
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When you open the newly-formatted RAM disk, you should see a file named “The Team”[…]
This mythical animal from the Mac bestiary has been tucked away as an Easter egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer for many years. Type the letters clarus or moof (the sound it makes) into the search box of that viewer to see the two emoji figures of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance, as shown in the Page Setup window in recent macOS.
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More inaccessible, but apparently present for even longer, is a PNG image showing marijuana leaves embedded inside the Chess app.
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According to a recent report in MacWorld, the colour-matched wallpapers provided for MacBook Neos spell out MAC.
Previously:
- MacBook Neo
- Almost Fired for Color Picker Poetry
- Tom Dowdy and SimpleText
- An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs
Update (2026-04-27): Jake Zien:
It’s not just the Neo wallpapers, they’ve been doing this for years on iPad, MacBook, iMac, Studio Display. Actually quite telling about the Neo’s positioning and importance within Apple that it says “Mac” instead of “Neo.”
Update (2026-04-28): Howard Oakley:
When I wrote that the Minimise Easter egg was defunct in macOS Tahoe, I was delighted to be corrected, thank you, as it’s still alive and flourishing.
In fact this had been documented just over a year ago by John Gruber on his Daring Fireball blog. I’ve added information from the macOS defaults site, and played around with this in a macOS 26.4.1 virtual machine.
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I think the leaves in the image are some type of Japanese Maple or other ornamental plant.
The comments on that first blog post from Bill Saperstein about his work on the G3 got me interested, and I found this super interesting interview with him at the Computer History Museum
https://youtu.be/hQiCpKnht6U
This one dude worked on:
- Apollo program
- Early RISC development at HP
- figured out how to make those DOS-compatible Macs like the 6100
- spearheaded the G3 system design as a skunkswork project - it was his idea to get IBM to include the backside L2 cache that made it so fast (1:22:26). Crazy story about Jobs almost cancelling the G3 at 1:34:38
- hooked up Nintendo and Foxconn
- lead development of Palm Pre system
- lead development of B&N's Nook reader
"I think the leaves in the image are some type of Japanese Maple or other ornamental plant."
Yeah, those don't look like cannabis leaves to me. If I had to guess, I'd say that someone intended to use maple leaves as a background pattern in the Chess app, and then someone else pointed out the similarity to cannabis leaves, so they ultimately weren't used.
