Did you know that Sosumi, the warning sound that has been present in the Sound controls since the days of the classic Mac OS operating system, has a little story?
Let me tell you…
There was a long-standing dispute between Apple and the Beatles (yes, the Beatles you know, John Lennon and all that). It was taken to the courts several times and then somehow resolved. According to the Beatles, the beginning of the problem was that Apple’s name was ‘Apple’. Because the name Appleactually belonged to a company called Apple Corps, which held the rights to the Beatles’ own productions, and the Beatles rightly didn’t want anyone but themselves to use the name ‘Apple’.
The first lawsuit between the Beatles and Apple was filed in 1978 and settled in 1981 with Apple paying $80,000 in damages. As a result of this lawsuit, a joint contract was signed and Apple pledged never to enter the music business. (For those who don’t know, Apple is now one of the largest music distributors in the world)
In 1986, Apple added a sound processing chip made by Ensoniq to the Apple II gs computer. It wasn’t long before a lawsuit followed. The Beatles were claiming breach of contract signed in 1981. As a result of this lawsuit, Apple announced that it would not use hardware-based synthesizers in its computers. And never used them again after that.
In 1989, Apple paid $26.5 million to The Beatles in another lawsuit that began in 1989 and was settled in 1991. Following the 1991 settlement, Apple Corps, owned by The Beatles, retained all rights to ‘creative works whose principal content is music’, while Apple Computer retained the rights to the Apple name for ‘various devices and services that can be used to create and play the content’. And under the same agreement, Apple would not facilitate the delivery of musical content through any physical media. This last point is important.
These lawsuits and the prices paid pushed Apple’s legal department to take more careful steps. Many components of the operating system were now approved by the legal department and then finalized. One of the details that Apple’s legal department wanted to change was a system warning sound called Chimes, created by Jim Reekes. Not the sound itself, but the name was deemed ‘too musical’ by the legal department. When it became clear that the name Chimes needed to be changed, Jim Reekes wanted to rename it Let it Beep. But when his colleagues told him that this name would not be approved by Apple’s legal department, he changed it to Sosumi. And told the legal department that it was a Japanese word and had nothing to do with the music business. Sosumi was nothing more than a spelling of So Sue Me. He did not read this phrase to his legal colleague, he spelled it as S, O, S, U, M, I. 🙂
And then what?
Then, Apple didn’t sit still and opened the iTunes Music Store in 2003. It started to sell songs and albums by making deals with major music distribution companies. And of course the Beatles didn’t sit idle and went to court again. In 2006, this time the Beatles’ Apple Corps lost the lawsuit. The most important factor for Apple Computer to win this case was the principle in the 1991 agreement that “musical content will not be distributed through physical media”. Indeed, Apple did not offer any physical content, but sold purely digital content.
In 2007, Apple Computer bought the rights to the word ‘Apple’ from the Beatles for 500 million dollars, ending 19 years of litigation. In 2010, Beatlesalbums were finally available for sale in the iTunes Store.
You can read more about Apple v. Beatles at the relevant Wikipedia link.
The web page of Jim Reeks, the designer of the Sosumi sound and the Macintosh boot sound, can be found here.
You can watch the interview with Jim Reekes below, including the Macintosh boot sound and the Sosumi story.
Finally, following the release of macOS Big Sur (macOS 11), Apple made changes to the system sound files. As a result, “Sosumi” is no longer a selectable alert sound. Instead, there is an alert sound named “Sonumi” which has a similar name. However, it is not the same sound. The original Sosumi alert sound remains in the System folder as an .aiff file, along with the older alert sounds. If you’re curious, you can find the older system alert sounds—including Sosumi—by navigating to /System/Library/Sounds.
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