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Steve Jobs is now selling tea

Technically Incorrect: A Polish drinks brand features the Apple co-founder on the box for its cherry-rum tea.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.


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"Why not apple tea?", you might muse.

Magadalena/Twitter screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

You're wandering around your local supermarket.

Suddenly, there's a familiar face on the front of a packet of tea.

Wait, it's Steve Jobs.

Magda Swirepo told me -- in Polish, naturally -- that's what happened to her in the Auchan supermarket in Katowice, Poland.

There she was just moseying around and there was Jobs in his classic beard-stroking pose wanting her to buy some cherry-rum tea.

So, she posted a picture on Twitter. Because, well, that's what you do when you wonder what on earth is going on.

Swirepo hadn't seen this brand before.

It's called Tea Rebels.

Where might this company have got its inspiration? Polish tech blogger Mackozer wisely suggested to me that it might be from Apple's famous "Here's To The Crazy Ones" ad.

Richard Dreyfus' voice-over begins: "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels." Aha.

You see, you'll never ever guess who's on the front of Tea Rebels' green tea. Why, John Lennon. He was also in that Apple ad.

And look at the black tea. Another star of the ad: Mahatma Gandhi.

I contacted Tea Rebels to wonder, among other things, whether the company had secured the rights to these images.

"The rights to commercially use an image of a deceased person is a very complex legal issue," a spokeswoman for the company told me. "Moreover, it depends on the jurisdiction of the deceased person and a country in which you operate. I can assure you we've obtained all necessary rights depending on the jurisdictions mentioned."

Parse that as you will.

I also contacted Apple to wonder whether it knew something of this. It didn't reply.

The truly wise, however, will have already spotted the vast marketing error in this curious tea party.

It was one that astonished Swirepo herself.

"They really couldn't have made an apple tea to put his face on?" she told me.

Update, May 27 at 11:55 a.m. PT: Adds comment from Tea Rebels.