Have you installed iOS 27 on your iPhone or iPadOS 27 on your iPad? Well, if you have, MacRumors has shared a little easter egg Apple left for you to discover.
Do this:
Meet Clarus the Dogcow. According to Wikipedia, Clarus is a bitmapped image designed by Apple for the demonstration of page layout in the classic Mac OS. The sound it makes is “Moof!”, which is a blend of “moo” and “woof.” The original glyph it was based on was created by Susan Kare for the Cairo dingbat font that came with the original Mac in 1984, but it became the official mascot of Apple’s Developer Technical Support.
The term “dogcow” was coined by Scott Zimmerman. She was later named Clarus by Mark “The Red” Harlan, as a joking reference to Claris, Apple’s business unit for office software at the time.
Clarus also made a comeback in 2022, when she showed up in macOS Ventura. If you pressed Command-Shift-P in certain applications, you’d get Clarus back.
In the early days of computing, developers would leave fun little easter eggs buried in their software. For example, In 1979, Atari released a game called Adventure for their Atari 2600 console. At the time, video game and software companies like Atari were reluctant to credit programmers, due to fears that their popularity would outshine that of the company.
Adventure’s creator Warren Robinett, when denied a mention in the game’s manual (yes, there were things called “manuals” that were included in the box with software and games back then), so he hid his name in the game, making it one of the first known Easter eggs in the world of software.
Players had to know exactly where to go and what to do in the game to uncover the Easter egg. I won’t spoil the surprise for any retro gamers that want to find the Easter egg on their own, but if you’re curious, you can find the method in this Wikipedia entry.
