Apple gets Beatles' Apple label, but does it really belong to Rene Magritte?

According to reports this week, the Beatles' Apple Records has transferred ownership of its Granny Smith label design, which first appeared on LPs back in 1968, to the Apple computer company.

Steve Jobs was a big Beatles fan and that influenced the company's name and its logo. The Beatles' Apple and the other Apple have engaged in numerous legal scraps over the name over the years, but things seem to have settled down once the Beatles' arranged a profitable deal to distribute their music on iTunes. Now it looks like they've relaxed on the logo, too.

The Granny Smith apple, of course, has been around a heckuva lot longer than the Beatles or Steve Jobs and was created by God or the universe, depending on your theological and philosophical views. But, according to Paul McCartney, the image that first found its way onto the Apple Records label was inspired by the art of Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte:

"I had this friend called Robert Fraser, who was a gallery owner in London. We used to hang out a lot. And I told him I really loved Magritte. We were discovering Magritte in the sixties, just through magazines and things.

And we just loved his sense of humour. And when we heard that he was a very ordinary bloke who used to paint from nine to one o'clock, and with his bowler hat, it became even more intriguing.

Robert used to look around for pictures for me, because he knew I liked him. It was so cheap then, it's terrible to think how cheap they were. But anyway, we just loved him

One day he brought this painting to my house. We were out in the garden, it was a summer's day. And he didn't want to disturb us, I think we were filming or something. So he left this picture of Magritte. It was an apple - and he just left it on the dining room table and he went. It just had written across it "Au revoir", on this beautiful green apple. And I tought that was like a great thing to do. He knew I'd love it and he knew I'd want it and I'd pay him later. So it was like wow! What a great conceptual thing to do, you know.

And this big green apple, which I still have now, became the inspiration for the logo. And then we decided to cut it in half for the B-side!"

Along with the painting that directly inspired the Beatles' logo, "Le jeu de mourre," the Granny Smith appears in other Magritte paintings as well, including the famous "The Son of Man," pictured here: