In 1984 IBM and Gates were essentially the same entity in most people's minds, and IBM was the face of the pair. Although Microsoft had been around since 1975, few people outside the hobbyist and Unix communities knew about Gates. (Yes, until MSDOS/Windows came out, Microsoft was primarily a Unix vendor; see Xenix).
OTOH, everybody knew the "IBM computer" (the Big Iron in the corporate basement) and the "IBM PC" (the latest rage in executive toys).
> For me, the best Super Bowl ad evah.
You, me, and nearly everyone else with a full set of brain cells. :-)
Best Super Bowl ad EVAH!
4 decades later Apple is part of Big Brother woke tech. Like the novel Winston Smith eventually loved Big Brother.
What is a “superbowl”? Large bowl of serial?
I remember that bouncy ad too. Quite memorable.
Ask any young person today what “1984” is referencing to they will not know.
It resonates but in all the wrong ways. It birthed the whole “let’s spend a whole bunch of money making an iconic micro-movie that actually doesn’t tell anybody anything about the product, and in fact barely even names it, cause Super Bowl.” It might be the most iconic SB commercial ever, but it’s not actually a good commercial, it does nothing to SELL the product. This all peaked with the .com boom, we got a whole bunch of really cool looking commercials that at the end of which you had no idea what was being advertised or why you should care. And 90% of them didn’t exist when the next SB hit.
Side note - I grew up in the 1950s before TVs (let alone telephones) were common. Life was simpler and I will say freer. Governments did not have as much control over us simply because the technology was not availble to keep an eye out on everything we did. That is not true today. Thanks to companies like Apple. The very thing their ad says they were fighting they helped create. Irony.
Big Brother Dystopian society
Moreso today than ever could be imagined
““On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’””
But, 2024 definitely sure feels like “1984”!
Apple lost out to Microsoft and struggled for some time. Microsoft started struggling when they tried to monopolize the browser, i.e. when they started acting like the Big Brother that Apple was.
But what can you run on a Apple? What free software but theirs?
I remember everybody panning that ad as being pretentious and not really directed at selling Apple computers - which truthfully, it didn’t.