GoKawiilMany have complained that Apple design has been sapped of some of its trademark whimsy in recent years. Well, here’s the latest example of how the tides seem to be changing.
Buried in the Settings app on iOS 27, Apple has hidden an easter egg that hails back from classic Mac OS; Clarus the Dogcow. Here’s how to trigger it …
iOS 27 includes a new feature that lets user customize the intensity of the Liquid Glass transparency effects, with a slider ranging from Clear to fully Tinted. You can find that setting on your iPhone by going to Settings -> Appearance -> Liquid Glass.
In this pane, Apple includes some faux website user interface so you can preview how the Liquid Glass appearance changes as you adjust the slider. There’s a little scrollable region including some text and photography from Apple Park.
Here’s where the easter egg comes in: scroll all the way to the bottom and keep pulling up with your finger and it will reveal a photo of a Clarus the Dogcow figurine next to the Apple Park pond. Rainbow text reading ‘Moof!’, the noise a dogcow makes, also appears in the example search text field.
And if you type ‘Moof!’ to Siri in Spotlight, it will even reply “Nice dogcow.”.
For those unfamiliar with the history, Clarus the Dogcow relates back to an icon created by Susan Kare for the original Mac, as a glyph for the Cairo font (the classic Mac’s icon font, similar to Windows’ Dingbats). It has essentially no utility; it’s just a bit of fun.