Apple has tucked a genuinely delightful piece of Mac history into iOS 27, and it is exactly the kind of surprise longtime Apple fans have been asking the company to bring back. Buried inside the redesigned Settings app is a hidden tribute to Clarus the Dogcow, the odd little black and white creature that Susan Kare originally created as a font glyph for the very first Macintosh.
How to Find the Easter Egg
To see it for yourself, open the Settings app and go to Appearance, then Liquid Glass. This is the new menu that lets you adjust how transparent or tinted the Liquid Glass interface looks across the system, using a slider that ranges from Clear all the way to fully Tinted.
Inside that settings pane, Apple shows a live preview panel with scrollable content, including some Apple Park imagery meant to demonstrate how the transparency effect behaves. Most people would stop scrolling once they hit the bottom of that preview. If you keep pulling upward past that point, though, a photo appears showing a Clarus the Dogcow figurine sitting near the reflecting pond at Apple Park.
It does not stop there. Look closely at the example search field shown in that same preview, and you will notice it displays the word “Moof!” written out in rainbow colored text. That is a direct callback to the sound Clarus the Dogcow makes, a nonsensical mix between a moo and a woof that has followed the character since the 1980s.
Apple went a step further this time. If you invoke Siri through Spotlight and actually say “Moof!” out loud, Siri responds with “Nice dogcow.” It is a small moment, but it shows a level of craftsmanship and personality that plenty of longtime Apple users have felt was missing from the company’s software in recent years.
Apple has added an easter egg in iOS 27
If you scroll to the bottom of the Liquid Glass demo, you will see it
His name is “Moof” pic.twitter.com/2TxjqExCLU
— Ash (@ashthequant) September 10, 2026
Who Is Clarus the Dogcow, Anyway
For anyone unfamiliar with the character, Clarus the Dogcow dates back to the original Macintosh in the 1980s. Susan Kare, the designer behind many of the Mac’s earliest icons and typefaces, created the dogcow as part of the Cairo font, where it appeared as a whimsical drawing used to demonstrate page layout options in early Mac software like the LaserWriter print dialog. Over time, the character became something of an unofficial mascot among Apple engineers and longtime Mac enthusiasts, showing up in developer documentation, technical notes, and even internal Apple culture for decades afterward.
Seeing Clarus resurface now, intentionally hidden inside one of the most modern parts of iOS 27, feels like a deliberate wink from Apple’s design team to people who remember that history.
On its own, a hidden easter egg in a settings menu will not change how anyone uses their iPhone. But the timing and placement say something bigger about where Apple’s software design is headed. Over the past several years, a common criticism from longtime Apple users and Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac owners alike has been that Apple’s interfaces became flatter, colder, and more clinical, trading personality for minimalism.
Liquid Glass itself, introduced as part of Apple’s broader visual overhaul, has been a return to a more expressive, layered look across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Finding a playful, deeply nostalgic reference like the dogcow embedded inside that same feature suggests Apple’s designers are consciously trying to bring warmth and humor back into the operating system, not just visual depth.
It is a small thing to stumble across while adjusting a transparency slider, but for anyone who has followed Apple’s design language since the classic Mac era, it is a nice reminder that some of that original spirit is still in there.
