“Apple became a household name in the third quarter of SuperBowl XVIII when it aired the enormously popular 1984 ad promoting the upcoming release of the Macintosh. Apple’s PR firm, Chiat/Day, had pitched a similar ad in 1982 to promote the Apple II. The basic premise was that the Apple II would only enable people, and not hinder them with inane commands and hard to understand interfaces. No executives were particularly enamored with the spot, and it was filed away for possible later use.”
Widely admired. But by the wrong people. It was the start of a basically disastrous positioning of the company and its products, which continued into ‘computers for the rest of us’ and ‘think different’. That is, it was directed at positioning the products and the company as being minority, superior, different from some other stupid and plebian choice which the inferior majority had chosen.
If that’s how you think of yourself, and to think such a positioning is sensible, that has to be how you think of yourself, you will never do what it takes to make a real difference.
And so we have at the end of this trail, the logical conclusion: we will make products which we will say are better than any others of their kind, but we will adopt a business model which means that no more than a few percent of the market can buy them, and if more try, well, we will just run out.
Along with this came all the unpleasant snobbery and derogatory comments one reads on forums like these about those who are thought to be ordinary users of ordinary computers. Sometimes they are retards, sometimes they shop at Walmart, sometimes they are rednecks, sometimes they drive cheap cars.
The tragedy of the whole story is that Apple really did have something, and it really could have made a difference to the world if it had been more widely available. Its management however preferred feeling superior to the rest of the world, to changing it.
Dead on. This was exactly what I was trying to puzzle out when I read about people complaining they no longer had a built in S-video port, yet completely ignored that Apple built a Dual-Core laptop.
The snobbery and rarity is just annoying, and psychologically defensive of that your product is not widely used/liked/developed. You can also see this in the BSD (cough, OpenBSD) and Linux (cough, Debian) communities.
Of recent, it appears Apple is finally addressing the complaints of the masses, that they want a cheaper iMac, an x86-fast iBook. Also the BSD/Linux community is getting over their own primadonnaness by actually addressing the weak areas
What’s your problem with Debian? I never considered it snobish, even before I started using it. Had I felt it is snobish, I would not have started using it.
OTOH, I share your feelings on OpenBSD.
As to the S-Video port. If people want it, need it, then it’s their full right to complain, when it gets dropped from a product line.
The tragedy of the whole story is that Apple really did have something, and it really could have made a difference to the world if it had been more widely available.
Apple didn’t have anything special. They like to pretend they invent the GUI, but it’s a complete load. Anyhow, the Amiga was released just a few months later, and it featured four times the memory, a floppy that stored more than twice the data, a faster system, full color graphics (compared to Apple’s lackluster black & white), stereo audio, full pre-emptive multitasking not matched until Windows 95, a much lower price, and many other features.
yet the commodore company still blew it badly.
Don’t you think that the firing of Steve Jobs shortly after the Mac’s introduction is the reason Apple sucked so badly for the next ten years or so? If the board of directors hadn’t made that boneheaded move and handed the most innovative computer company in the world over to the former CEO of Pepsi, the Mac platform and Apple certainly would have been a lot more successful between 1985 and 1997 than they were.
It had nothing to do with the ad. People loved the ad. No one was insulted by it, except perhaps IBM employees.
The Mac was just too expensive, and as a company Apple drifted around like a ship with no captain in the years Jobs was exiled. Seriously, WTF does running Pepsi have to do with innovation?
A big corporation pretending to be different and unique with their consumer products brought to the masses.
It’s a nice diss to IBM though. For a more in-depth analysis of the commercial, check out:
http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm
And if you want to know what influence it has had on pop culture, I recommend checking out ytmnd.com and searching for ‘future conan’.
lol
http://future-conan-saved.ytmnd.com/
I had a printing and publishing company in 1984 and trust me, Apple changed the whole damn universe. Maybe it just wasn’t the universe you were in at the time.
No matter how many times I hear/read that story, I love hearing/reading it.
Apple’s mission has always been about building the best products they can build, and they do. They’ve never been about selling the most. They’re very profitable, and successful.
Redmond start your photo copiers. meet OS X
you are using what we had back in OS 9 LOL
VISTA=more viruses….. when will you get tired??