The Beatles Apple billion dollar lawsuit. That little sound right there was born from all three. Yes, it's the alert tone that's been shipping on Mac since 1991 and it's called so sue me and is literally a 30-year-old prank that an Apple engineer pulled on a team of billiondoll lawyers and then smuggled it into the operating system and then the meaning of it for over a decade. Say the name out loud slowly. So sue me. So yes, sue me. Hey everyone, my name is Annaniel Kubo and today we're rewinding the clock because this is one of the best engineer versus legal stories and there's a lesson in it for every single one of us who has ever had to name something in our code. So our main character here is a man named Jim Reeks and in the late 1980s Jim is a sound designer and engineer at Apple working on something called the sound manager in system 7 which is basically the part of the Mac that handles audio. And if you've ever used an old Mac, you've heard Jim's work. That magical startup cord when your machine powers on, that's him. The camera shutter click your iPhone still makes today when you take a photo, also him. The guys responsible for some of the most hard sounds on planet up. But the one we care about today is a tiny xylophone alert. Beep. And to understand why I ended up with the most passive aggressive name in software history, we have to talk about a lawsuit. It consists of two famous companies called Apple. There's Apple Computer, the one you know, and then there's Apple Corpse, the record label founded by the Beatles back in 1968. And these two have some serious beef. Back in 1978, Apple Corpse sued Apple Computers over the name Apple as trademark infringement. They settled out of court and the deal is basically fine. You can be Apple, just stay out of the music business. You do computers, we do music. Cool. except computers slowly starting getting real good at music. Apple added sound chips. They added the ability to record audio. They added MIDI, the standard that lets you plug musical instruments into a computer. And Apple Corpse looks at this and goes, "Huh, that sounds an awful lot like the music business." So, they sue again. And the fallout from all of this lands directly on the desk of our engineer Jim Ree because now every single sound, every musical feature has to get reviewed by Apple's legal department, including the names. Now, here's where every developer watching is going to feel a little something in their soul. Legal didn't just review the sounds. They started coming after the names of things in the code. And I mean down to the API level. Jim gets told he had to rename a command in the API. It was called note cmd as in musical note to frequency cmd because note sounded too musical. And any of you who've shipped real software know exactly why that's a nightmare. You don't just rename a public API on a whim. Other applications are depending on the name. Rename it and you break everyone's code right before a deadline. And this is the kind of thing that makes engineers lose their minds. being told to rename a perfectly good working identifier for a reason that has nothing to do with the software and everything to do with a lawsuit. So Jim's just sitting there frustrated watching lawyers redefine his work. And one of his alert sounds, a little xylophone tone, originally just called xylophone, gets flagged because you guessed it, it sounded too musical and needed a new name. And that's the moment the legend is born. Jim, half joking, completely fed up, says, "Fine, I'll rename the sound. I'll call it let it beep which if you know the Beatles is a pun on let it be. So he's been openly mocking the lawsuit. Everyone's laughing. It's a joke. And somebody goes there is no way you'll get that pass legal. And Jim shrugs and says so me. And then this is the part I love. He stops because he realizes that's it. That's the name. He takes soi. He mashes it together and he respells it to S O S U M I. Sumi. And here's the genius of it. He's the actual exploit. He submits the name to the legal department in writing, never spoken out loud. He specifically asked the person dealing with the lawyers to spell it out, not pronounce it, and then tells them it's a Japanese word with no musical meaning at all. The thing is, it's not Japanese. It means nothing. He straight up lied to the lawyer's faces on paper in a way they couldn't hear the joke and they approved it. The mockery passes legal review and the joke is shipped. Now, think about the discipline this took because the joke only works if no one ever finds out. So Jim Reeek sat on this secret for over a decade. He didn't tell people what Susumi really meant because he was genuinely worried that if the truth got out, Apple would yank the sound from the operating system to avoid stirring up a lawsuit again. So the joke just lived there quietly on millions of machines sitting in system 7 sound menu and then Mac OS 8, 9, OSX, every single version had a tiny xylophone beep named Sumi and almost nobody knew. And get this, it is still there in modern Mac OS. The sound got reampled and slightly renamed to this. But the original lives on. And that little engineers rebellion has now been riding along in the operating system for over 30 years. It has outlived the lawsuit. It's outlived floppy disc. And it will probably outlive us all. And here's the thing. Suzumi wasn't even the only time Jim did this. The iconic Mac startup cord, the big warm bong when a Mac was on. Jim hated the old startup sound. The Mac crashed so often back then that the old tone basically became the sound of your computer just died rebooted. So he recorded a brand new one, a clean C major chord on a synth in his living room. And what did he draw inspiration from for that chord? The ending of the Beatles song, A Day in the Life. So while Apple's lawyers were fighting the Beatles in court, their own engineer was using a Beatles soundtrack as the reference for the sound on every Mac. The irony writes itself. Oh, and he didn't have permission to change the startup sound either. No, he suck it into the boot rum on the Max Quadra. So late in the project, that was when people noticed the excuse was basically, "It's too risky to take out now." Pulling in my crash. Something classic. And that camera shutter sound, the click your iPhone makes every time you take a photo or a screenshot, that's a recording of Jim's own 1970s Canon film camera. Slow down billions of photo days and it's still his own camera. Incredible. And the joke didn't just stay in the sound menu. It made it into the codebase to this day. If you go inspect the source on Apple's own product pages, the CSS class they used to style the legal fine print, the disclaimers, the tiny terms and condition text at the bottom, it's named Sumi. Think about that. The same company's lawyers got pranked now use Sumi as the literal class name for their legal text. The joke went from an audio file to a 30-year inside gag to a convention sitting in production CSS that front-end devs trip over to this day. The engineers won quietly and permanently. So that's the part I want you to take away with you today. We as engineers name things all day. Variables, functions, classes, services. Most of it's invisible. Most of it no one will ever read. But every now and then, someone slips a little bit of themselves into the code. A tiny act of rebellion that outlives the thing it was rebelling against. So the next time you're naming something in your code, maybe make it a good one. You never know, it might still be shipping in 30 years
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