On January 22, 1984, Apple made the only nationwide airing of its "1984" TV commercial.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1984 (advertisement)


The heroine (Anya Major) running with her sledgehammer

Release date
December 31, 1983: (local broadcast in Idaho)
January 22, 1984: (only national broadcast)

Budget $370,000–$900,000

"1984" is an American television commercial that introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer. It was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas and Lee Clow at ChiatDay, produced by New York production company Fairbanks Films, and directed by Ridley Scott. English athlete Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine and David Graham as Big Brother. It first aired in 10 local outlets, including Twin Falls, Idaho, where ChiatDay ran the ad on December 31, 1983, at the last possible break before midnight on KMVT, so that the advertisement qualified for the 1984 Clio Awards. Its second televised airing, and only national airing, was on January 22, 1984, during a break in the third quarter of the telecast of Super Bowl XVIII by CBS.

1984 Apple Macintosh Commercial

I still think this is one of the best ads ever put to film.

[5X]

1. To me, it always said what apple was

was not a fan of their locked down hardware.

[hunter]

4. The Apple II GS was upgradable, and both hardware and software were easily accessible...

... to third parties.

The Apple IIc was more useful than the original Macintosh and cost less.

The 6502 microprocessor of the Apple II and the 65C186 of the GS were the forerunners of the RISC microprocessors that now dominate computing.

But Apple decided to run with the locked down ecosystem of the Macintosh. This is still Apple's business model.

The truly revolutionary computer, the one that changed the world, was the Acorn Archimedes of 1987. This was the first home computer using a RISC processor.

Ultimately the original Macintosh was a dead end, as was the MSDOS based PC environment.

Macintosh System 7, introduced in 1991, and Windows ME, introduced in 2000, were the last of their lines. The transition to modern hardware and operating systems didn't seem as abrupt as it might have been because new machines were able to emulate previous architectures.

We had the technology to build some fairly wonderful computers by the mid 'eighties but people bought a bunch of lies instead.

Ronald Reagan was another lie people bought in the 'eighties.

[5X]

2. Apple wanted to replace the image on that screen, not destroy it.

[hunter]

3. And so Apple became Big Brother...

... with their cute little computer.