Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda

If you ever wondered why iPhones and iPads often show 9:41 as the time on the lock screen and in the status bar in ads and posters, the reason is that the Apple keynotes were often planned out to do the biggest product introduction about forty minutes into the show. (Note that online videos of these presentations omit clips of copyrighted material from music, TV shows, and movies, so the times are off.) The idea was to have the time in the marketing photos of the new product match, or at least be close to, the actual time in the hall at the moment of the reveal. So it was for the iPhone. After that, using 9:41 became a tradition, perhaps a superstition. Apple Watch uses 10:09 for a totally different reason—that’s just how the designers thought the hands looked best, especially on analog faces. Go figure.