Apple: The First 50 Years
by David Pogue · 10 Mar 2026 · 686pp · 216,944 words
of college students whose first computers were Macs became lovingly locked into the Apple ecosystem for the rest of their lives—and, often, their children’s. “1984” On Sunday, January 22, the L.A. Raiders beat the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XVIII. But for millions of Americans, the most memorable moment was the
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prison, maybe. Endless lines of bald men march in sync, eyes dead. An authoritarian voice blasts from screens along the tunnel. The “1984” ad generated more attention than the Super Bowl itself. The drone men sit mutely on long benches while Big Brother (wearing two sets of glasses) indoctrinates them. “Our Unification of
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. Scott loved it enough to make it part of the ad. The ad actually aired many times. The usual story goes that Apple aired the commercial only once, during the Super Bowl—a stroke of genius that instantly made it rare, mythical, and talked about. But Chiat/Day wanted to enter the ad
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for 1983, which meant that it had to have aired before the end of the year. So the ad actually premiered three weeks before the Super Bowl—once, quietly, at 1 a.m., on KMVT in Twin Falls, Idaho. It did wind up winning 35 awards, including the Oscar of advertising: the
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Grand Prix at the annual Cannes Lions ad conference. But after the Super Bowl, Apple also played the ad in movie theaters during the trailers, and on TV in the ten biggest U.S. cities
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Boca Raton, home of IBM’s PC division, just for spite. “It was designed to have a media life beyond the Super Bowl,” says Clow. “But the board of directors at Apple decided it was irresponsible to continue running it [nationally], since the product wasn’t even available yet. And that becomes almost
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confident that he was sitting on something spectacular. He wanted to air it during the Super Bowl—twice, in fact. Never mind the $1.6 million cost; it was the kind of splash the Mac deserved. The Macintosh Dating Game The purpose of a corporate sales conference is to fire up a company
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Gates hasn’t clicked on it recently. In December, just before the big game, he and Mike Murray met with the Apple board to get their sign-off on buying Super Bowl airtime. Murray rolled the VCR into the meeting and hit Play. “And halfway through,” he says, “I clearly remember one of
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’ve ever seen,” said another. “Can I get a motion to fire the ad agency?” Mike Markkula asked. Sculley ordered Mike Murray to sell off Apple’s Super Bowl slots. Jobs and Murray were shattered; this ad was spectacular! Woz loved it so much that he offered to split the cost of the
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Super Bowl airtime with Jobs. Of course, for the board, it wasn’t about the money. It was about the humiliation of airing a terrible ad. As
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ordered, Chiat/Day set to work selling its Super Bowl ad slots: one to Heinz, one to Hertz. But as the sun set in New York, with two days before the big game, they couldn
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’t find a buyer for the 60-second slot. (According to legend, Chiat/Day may not have tried especially hard.) Apple was now the proud owner of one minute-long chunk of Super Bowl airtime. The full ad would air. Today, everyone knows what happened. The ad was an instant cultural phenomenon. “The
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no-strings return policy on anything you buy directly from Apple. There was, however, no ad campaign. “Test Drive a HomePod,” anyone? There was a lasting societal effect, too: “It created a phenomenon where people started designing advertising specifically for the Super Bowl, and keeping it secret, and having it be a surprise
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extension cord,” said one, “and almost as cheap.” But today, if they remember the Macintosh Office campaign at all, people are most likely to remember only one ad: the one that aired on the Super Bowl. Lemmings The “1984” ad had become historic and insanely effective. Jobs hoped that Chiat/Day could make lightning
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, you’ll be sorry.” A huge temporary screen stood at one end of the stadium, so that the Super Bowl crowd could watch the ad live. And 86,000 white cushions, bearing the multicolored Apple logo, padded the seats of the Stanford University stadium—a free ad in every TV camera shot. (Today
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Sculley—along with Jobs’s girlfriend and Sculley’s wife—watched from their Apple-padded seats. But when it ended, there was no ecstatic cheering. “It must have been the only completely silent moment in Super Bowl history,” Sculley says. Apple’s phone lines were suddenly flooded. Irate callers, disgusted by the ad, shouted
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it was about. “We bit it, big-time,” Hayden says. Whereas the “1984” ad has been called one of the best ads ever aired, the 1985 ad would be called one of the worst. Apple did not air another Super Bowl ad for 14 years. What Happened to the Lisa In hopes of reviving
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/Day team built a flawless replica of the HAL computer’s faceplate, which involved renting a $100,000 specialty lens to represent the red “eye.” Apple aired the ad on the Super Bowl during the first ad break after the kickoff. The next day, Stanley Kubrick called Jobs directly, congratulating
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at 40.” The IBM Challenge: Dan Farber, “Macintosh’s 100-Day Marketing Blitz: After the Applause, Confusion,” CNET, Jan. 23, 2014. Influencers: Interview with Mike Murray; Hertzfeld, p. 325. “1984”: Sculley, pp. 241, 243; Bloomberg Originals, “The Real Story Behind Apple’s Famous ‘1984’ Super Bowl Ad,” YouTube, Dec. 3, 2014; CHM, “CHM Live: Insanely Great
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Its Shine?,” MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, PBS, Apr. 5, 1985; Erik Sandberg-Diment, “Macintosh Marketing Overcomes Its Drawbacks,” New York Times, March 26, 1985, C4. Lemmings: Sculley, p. 295; Daniella Hernandez, “Tech Time Warp of the Week: The Horrifying Apple Super Bowl Ad That Time Forgot, 1985,” Wired, Jan. 31, 2014. What Happened to the
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-Fi: McGee, ch. 10; John C. Dvorak, “The iBook Disaster,” PC Magazine, July 26, 1999. CHAPTER 32: MILLENNIUM Hello, Dave: Ken Segall, “Behind HAL: Apple’s Last Super Bowl Ad,” KenSegall.com. Mac OS X: Interview with Avie Tevanian. The First Demo: Chafkin, ch. 6. The Cube: Interview with Jon Rubinstein; Steven Levy
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, 106, 129, 129–31, 133, 133–34, 136, 140, 143, 344, 385 for Macintosh Office, 159–60, 179 by Pepsi, under Sculley, 105 for personalized Siri, 513 for PowerBooks, 273 for Power Mac G3, 326 during Super Bowl, 129–31, 133–34, 160, 344 “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads
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” iMac G4, 350, 384, 386, 386–87 Sun Microsystems, Inc., 193, 232, 233, 264–65, 267, 278, 282, 319 Sunnyvale, CA, 5 Sun Remarketing, 161 Super Bowl ads, 129–31, 133–34, 160, 344 SuperDrive, 197, 199, 358 SuperMacs, 261 Supreme Court, U.S., 195, 196 Susman, Galyn, 211 sustainability, 149–50
After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle · 2 May 2022 · 535pp · 149,752 words
pitched it as a machine that would democratize technology and dethrone the largest computer maker, IBM. Working with the advertising agency Chiat/Day, he developed an Orwellian Super Bowl
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy · 2 Feb 1994 · 244pp · 66,599 words
ship. You had to ship. You had to ship. Real artists ship. ~ CHAPTER 7 On January 22, during the third quarter of the otherwise unmemorable Super Bowl between the Oakland Raiders and the Washington Redskins, a cut to a commercial turned the nation's television sets over to some extremely weird images
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the screen just destroyed, but the television screens of 43 million people watching the Super Bowl-appeared the followingwords: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984." This was the notorious "1984" spot. Directed by Ridley Scott, it had all the cyberpunk film noir of
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Computer bought air time for it only twice: once late in December, in an obscure television market some- where on the Great Plains, so that it would be eligible for the inevitable awards in the new year; and the other during the Super Bowl. But Apple
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known its power all along, as an example of "event marketing.") Long after people forgot who played in that Super Bowl, they remembered the commercial. It was Apple's first official public acknowledgment that Macintosh existed. Real Artists Ship. Those words must have been ringing in the ears of Mac team designers, in Jobs
Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
by Patrick McGee · 13 May 2025 · 377pp · 138,306 words
Cook at all illustrated just how much he’d learned in his twelve-year sabbatical from Apple. The young Steve Jobs detested IBM and everything it stood for. Apple’s most famous TV ad, introducing the Macintosh at the 1984 Super Bowl, portrayed IBM as an Orwellian Big Brother, stifling innovation. But IBM had also outmaneuvered
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crime scene as he considers the whodunit at the heart of China’s advances in electronics. Look around, he says, “There’s Apple DNA everywhere.” “Real Danger” For the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple released the most iconic computer TV spot ever. It featured a mass of gray, brainwashed citizens, listening intently to an Orwellian Big
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stress and marital difficulties of employees at, 150–52 Super Bowl ad of, 383–84 Think Different campaign of, 49–50, 68, 94, 212, 384 Apple I, 23 Apple II, 19, 20, 22–24, 27–29 Apple II Age, The (Nooney), 22 Apple Intelligence, 379–81 Apple Pay, 293 Apple product production, 2, 9, 19, 24, 25,
Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
by Ken Kocienda · 3 Sep 2018 · 255pp · 76,834 words
, they went to the NFL championship game, but lost. Over the following seven years, the Packers won five championships, including victories in the first two Super Bowls, a step-by-step, year-by-year progression through the ranks from worst to best to legends, all built on the foundations of one humble
Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain · 15 Mar 2020 · 540pp · 119,731 words
to the grass and flipped their cards in flawless unison back to blue, then snapped up into a standing position with the precision of a Super Bowl halftime show. They formed an animation of a soccer player sprinting and kicking a ball, followed by the word “goal.” The soccer player then
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Pendleton’s “marketing onslaught” that had allowed Samsung to close the “coolness gap with Apple Inc.” The article riveted the tech industry. But the Super Bowl was fast approaching (six days away), and Pendleton wasn’t finished attacking Apple’s position in the marketplace. He had a new $15 million ad-libbed commercial
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set to air during the Super Bowl, made with 72andSunny, featuring comic banter among Paul Rudd and
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Seth Rogen and Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk, plotting their own fictional ad spot for the Super Bowl. “We
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wrote. “In 1997 Apple had no products to market. We had a company making so little money that we were 6 months from out of business….Not the world’s most successful tech company. Not the company that everybody wants to copy and compete with.” Samsung’s Super Bowl ad was “pretty
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Ramstad, “Has Apple Lost Its Cool to Samsung?” The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323854904578264090074879024. The article riveted the tech industry: Kovach, “How Samsung Won and Then Lost.” He had a new $15 million ad-libbed: Jason Evangelho, “With Hilarious 2-Minute Super Bowl Ad, Samsung
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-super-bowl-ad-samsung-officially-steals-cool-factor-from-apple/#130b5461326a. “We actually can’t say”: “New Samsung Commercial Mocks Apple Lawsuits in SuperBowl Teaser Ad Feat. Odenkirk, Rudd & Rogen,” posted by YouTube user Zef Cat on
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February 1, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf2xRupwzoA. “a barrage of not-so-subtle jabs”: Evangelho, “With Hilarious 2-Minute Super Bowl Ad.” “We have a lot
Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
by Andy Hertzfeld · 19 Nov 2011
page 217). The commercial got a rapturous reception. In fact the response was so great that Apple booked two expensive slots, for 60 seconds and 30 seconds, costing over a million dollars, to show it during Super Bowl XVIII, which was just two days before the Mac introduction. Mike Murray and Steve Jobs
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screened the commercial for Apple’s board of directors in December to get final approval for the huge Superbowl expenditure. To
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(see “1984” on page 180), which was shown for the first and only time during the Superbowl two days before, filled the screen, featuring a beautiful young woman athlete storming into a meeting of futuristic skinheads, throwing a sledge-hammer at Big Brother, imploding the screen in a burst of apocalyptic
The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson · 15 Nov 1995 · 317pp · 101,074 words
, it is usually because we're witnessing events all at the same time on television—whether it is the Challenger blowing up after liftoff, the Super Bowl, an inauguration, coverage of the Gulf War, or the O. J. Simpson car chase. We are "together" at those moments. Another worry people have is
Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum · 1 May 2016 · 519pp · 142,646 words
word processing product line. And of course 1984 has at least one large significance in the history of personal computing: it was the year the Apple Macintosh was released (it came to the attention of many people for the first time during a memorable sixty-second Super Bowl commercial, replete with Orwellian imagery and directed
Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger · 29 Jul 2013 · 528pp · 146,459 words
consumer marketing. In what was one of the most memorable advertising campaigns of the 1980s, Apple produced a spectacular television advertisement that was broadcast during the Super Bowl on 22 January 1984: Apple Computer was about to introduce its Macintosh computer to the world, and the commercial was intended to stir up anticipation for the
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