A closer look
Software engineer Jim Reekes created the iconic Apple Macintosh trash can crunch sound by recording the noise of his own messy real-life garbage being aggressively packed down. He also composed the famous Mac startup chord to be deeply soothing in order to calm users who had just crashed their machines and were likely experiencing homicidal levels of stress. It is incredibly poetic that the pristine, minimalist aesthetic of Apple's walled garden relies on an audio file of a frustrated developer smashing trash into a metal bin. Every time you empty your digital desktop to free up some pathetic amount of megabytes, you are quite literally listening to the auditory ghost of a 1990s programmer's actual physical garbage. Nothing screams high-end luxury computing quite like the digitized Foley art of household waste disposal!
