Happy Mac

A Happy Mac is the normal boot up icon of a Macintosh running older versions of Mac OS. It was removed with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.2, which replaced it with a large grey Apple logo.

When you boot a Macintosh, it makes a startup chime and the screen turns gray. After a few seconds a Happy Mac icon will appear, followed by the splash screen of whatever version of the Mac OS you are running. The Happy Mac indicates booting has successfully begun, whereas a Sad Mac icon indicates a problem in the boot up sequence.

On early Macs that had no internal hard drive, the computer would boot up to a point where it would need to load the operating system from floppy disk. Until the user inserted the correct disk, the Mac would display a blinking disk icon. In actual Macintosh computers, a folder icon with a question mark that repeatedly changes to the Finder icon is shown.

On Old World ROM Macs, the Happy Mac icon is a monochrome icon stored in the Macintosh Toolbox ROM.

On New World ROM Macs, the Happy Mac icon is a color icon stored in the Mac OS ROM file on disk.