This week, 25 years ago, a company aired an advertisement that would cement that company's name into the minds of many. It was an advertisement about individuality versus conformism, about light versus dark, about new versus established. It was the most expensive advertisement of its time, and yet, it didn't even show the product it was trying to sell. After the ad was over, all we knew was that something called "Macintosh" was going to show us how 1984 wouldn't be like 1984.
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2006-10-13
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64 KB of RAM, a 400 KB floppy, a tiny B&W display, and an OS barely better than DOS. Sorry - wasn't impressed at all. The Amiga, release two months after the Mac, had 256 KB of RAM (expandable to 512 KB), an 880 KB floppy, a large color display, and an OS that wasn't equaled until 1995... for less money than the Mac. Now THAT had me drooling. In 1985.
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2008-04-10
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2005-11-13
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2005-07-06
"That they mistook who their competitor really has. They had their eye on IBM, but got blindsided by Microsoft."
IBM was clueless too. They thought it was all about the hardware. Turns out they were mostly wrong.
Sure PC companies have made money. But nothing like Microsoft who only has to worry about packaging software, not building computers. Good thing considering the problems they've had with the 360.
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2005-07-06
Fact fans - this isn't that ad's 25th birthday at all. That was 15th December 2008. It was aired at one o'clock in the morning on KMVT, Channel 11 in Twin Falls, Idaho on 15th December 1983, in order to be eligible for ad awards. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/15/1984_ad_anniversary/ for details.
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2005-11-12
Fact fans - this isn't that ad's 25th birthday at all. That was 15th December 2008. It was aired at one o'clock in the morning on KMVT, Channel 11 in Twin Falls, Idaho on 15th December 1983, in order to be eligible for ad awards. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/15/1984_ad_anniversary/ for details.
Geek alert! Geek alert! Shields up!
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2005-08-12
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2005-06-29
Times change, people change. The 1984 would never work in today's cynical hasty world. So the Get a Mac commercials are actually more fitting. And by the way, show me any recent computer industry commercial that rivals either 1984 or Get a Mac in terms of impact. There are just none.
Also for those who haven't seen it, here's a treat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E
Member since:
2005-10-12
It was in fact a disaster. The commercial embodied the Cupertino mindset that confined Apple to a locked in niche. It was the spirit of the disaster that Apple became in the following decade. Jobs was creator, nemesis and then savior, all in this same limited, limiting and restricted culture, and its all down to the cultural spirit embodied in this view of Apple and its users as beleagured small dissenting and to some degree victimized minorities.
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2006-02-22
the same company produced this gem. A lesson for budding advertisers, try not to insult the people you are selling to 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYP1Tjgt1Ao
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2005-10-31
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2006-01-01
