On the last night of 1983, a single television station in Twin Falls, Idaho, ran a strange sixty-second film just before midnight. Almost nobody saw it. That was the point. Apple's agency, Chiat/Day, slipped the ad onto KMVT at the last possible break of the year so it would legally qualify for the 1984 advertising awards. The real audience was still three weeks away — and roughly ninety-six million people strong.
The ad that only aired once
On January 22, 1984, during a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on CBS, Apple aired "1984" to the nation for the first and only time. Conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and creative director Lee Clow at Chiat/Day, produced by Fairbanks Films, and directed by Blade Runner's Ridley Scott, it borrowed its nightmare wholesale from George Orwell. Rows of grey, shaven drones shuffle through a tunnel toward a giant screen where a Big Brother figure drones on about "the unification of thoughts." Then a runner in red shorts — the English athlete Anya Major, a stylized Macintosh on her tank top — sprints past the thought police and hurls a brass-headed sledgehammer through the screen. White light, a gasp, and a line of text: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984."
It is now routinely called the greatest commercial ever made. Advertising Age placed it at the top of its list of the 50 greatest, and the Clio Awards inducted it into their Hall of Fame in 1995. What's easy to forget is that Apple's own board of directors hated it. When it was screened for them, several members reportedly sat in stunned silence and asked Chiat/Day to sell back the Super Bowl airtime. The agency stalled; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak fought for it — Wozniak even offered to split the cost of airing it personally. The slot ran. By Monday morning it was national news, and Apple had paid for a single sixty-second spot and received the equivalent of a prime-time documentary in free coverage.
"It sure is great to get out of that bag"
Two days later, on January 24, 1984, Jobs took the stage at the Flint Center in Cupertino for Apple's annual shareholder meeting. He quoted Bob Dylan, let the theme from Chariots of Fire swell, and then walked to a small canvas bag at center stage. Out came the Macintosh. He slid a floppy disk into the drive, and the little machine ran through a slideshow of what it could do — crisp fonts, a hand-drawn Mona Lisa, the word "MACINTOSH" in a typeface no other computer could render. Then, in a thin synthesized voice, the computer introduced itself: "Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag." The hall came apart. Grown engineers wept.
The machine earning that ovation was, on paper, modest. A Motorola 68000 processor clocked at 7.84 MHz. Just 128 kilobytes of memory. A nine-inch black-and-white screen at 512×342 pixels, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a one-button mouse, all sealed in a beige case with a built-in handle. It cost $2,495 — about $7,700 in today's money. By the standards of the IBM PC it was underpowered and, to many corporate buyers, a toy.
A new kind of computer
But the Macintosh was not selling specifications. It was selling an idea: that a computer could be something you pointed at rather than something you memorized. There was no cryptic command line, no manual of incantations. You moved a mouse, you clicked on pictures, you dragged a file into a trash can shaped like a trash can. The desktop metaphor that Apple's team had been refining since their famous visits to Xerox PARC — and that the ill-fated Lisa had introduced at ten thousand dollars — now arrived at a quarter of the price, in a box one person could carry.
Behind the handle was a small, fanatical team: hardware wizard Burrell Smith, software hackers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson, and designer Susan Kare, whose hand-drawn icons and fonts gave the machine its warmth. They had worked under a pirate flag Jobs encouraged them to fly, convinced they were building the future rather than a product. The project had been started years earlier by Jef Raskin, who named it after his favorite apple variety, the McIntosh, before Jobs took it over and bent it to his will.
Sales came fast at first — around 70,000 units by early May 1984 — and the Macintosh established desktop publishing as a reason the whole industry would eventually follow Apple's lead. Yet the machine's very elegance hid a problem. With only 128K of memory and no hard drive, it strained to run the software that would justify its price. The revolution had launched. Whether Apple could survive the aftermath was another question entirely.
Next: the hangover after the party — slowing Mac sales, a bruising power struggle, and the man Jobs hired to run Apple who would end up forcing him out.
Comments
Post a Comment