If you’ve been sipping cosmopolitans while spinning old episodes of Sex and the City on DVD, you may have noticed a curious gaffe during the scenes where Carrie Bradshaw is pecking away on her Apple laptop: The Apple logo is upside down.

Former Apple employee Joe Moreno posted an interesting factoid to his Mea Vita (My Life) blog over the weekend on the subject of how the Apple logo appears on the company’s laptops. Specifically, the logo appears upside-down when the lid of the notebook is open, which is no longer the case with models made these days.

As it turns out, the decision came down from Steve Jobs. Even though the co-founder knew the Apple logo would be upside-down while open, he “believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the onlooker” after the design group “noticed that users constantly tried to open the laptop from the wrong end.”

“Apple has an internal system called Can We Talk? where any employee can raise questions on most any subject,” Moreno explains of the decision. “So we asked, ‘Why is the Apple logo upside down on laptops when the lid is open?’

“We were told by the Apple design group, which takes human interface issues very seriously, that they had studied the placement of the logo and discovered a problem,” Moreno continues. “If the Apple logo was placed such that it was right side up when the lid was opened then it ended up being upside down when the lid was closed, from the point of view of the user. (If you're currently using an Apple laptop made in the past eight years, then close the lid and you'll see that the Apple logo will be upside down from your point of view, but right side up when opened.)”

Maybe Steve Jobs was a closet Sex and the City fan? We may never know the truth…

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

(Image courtesy of Joe Moreno)