The Unexpected Reason Why The Calendar Emoji Says July 17

Apple enthusiasts can resemble the diehards of popular movie franchises like Star Wars and Marvel. With an intense and loyal following, the company's products command similar levels of cultural gravitas: fans wait in long lines for new releases, hotly debate the merits of every new iteration, and search for hidden Easter eggs in its applications. Apple even teases product reveals as if they were new movie trailers.

For its part, Apple encourages this engagement, including hidden features in its latest iOS update and encoding secret messages into its application icons and ads. Oftentimes, these Easter eggs hark back to specific moments in the company's history. For instance, Apple's iPhone and Apple Watch ads always show the exact time the company first unveiled the product, 9:41 and 10:09, respectively. This carries over to Apple's applications as well. For example, the Apple Maps icon initially displayed the address of the company's first campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. Even its emojis sport hidden codes, like when the company's open book emoji displayed the script of one of its most famous ads. So it's no wonder that fans would see the July 17 icon on the company's calendar emoji and wonder if there was a hidden meaning behind it. 

So why does the calendar emoji sport that seemingly random July 17? It all goes back to 2002 when Apple held the Macworld Expo in New York. Once the company's premier publicity event, the yearly exposition introduced revolutionary products like the iPhone to a global audience. At the 2002 conference, the flagship product was the 10.2 version of Mac OSX. Named Jaguar, the operating system came with over 150 new features, including a new Mail application, iChat, and Rendezvous, Apple's home networking system. The expo also brought Apple's iCal to the scene, a then-revolutionary software that enabled users to manage, share, and update multiple calendars on a single platform.

What does this little history lesson have to do with the calendar emoji? Well, if you're predicting that iCal was first introduced on July 17, 2022, then you'd be correct. In a self-congratulatory nod that is, at this point, a common practice for the world's most lucrative tech company, Apple set the calendar emoji to the date it first revealed its revolutionary calendar application. It is no coincidence either that July 17 is also World Emoji Day, as the initiator of the yearly tradition and founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge, selected the date because of the date on the calendar emoji icon.