'1984' and all that
A famous Apple commercial and how it failed to persuade me.
My sources tell me that Super Bowl LVIII will take place on Sunday, February 11. I’m celebrating with some time travel back to Super Bowl XVIII, in 1984, when Apple introduced its Macintosh computer with one of the most famous TV commercials in history.
Follow me over to Medium, where I’ve published “It’s Been 40 Years Since ‘1984,’ and I Still Haven’t Bought an Apple product.” (Friend link, to bypass the paywall.)
I wasn’t influenced by this famous ad campaign, either.
I think different, just not that kind of different.
I've always been confused by the adulation for Apple's advertisements - yes, they are visually striking, in sort of a Rothkoid fashion, but their aesthetic is defined by refusing to show you pretty much any features of the device itself, or even the genuinely, erm, iconic iconography of, e.g., the Finder guy. (In the 1984 ad, the runner is wearing a tank top with Apple's old CPU-with-an-apple-next-to-it logo on it, but that's only obvious if you squint at a hi-def freeze frame - astonishingly unlikely at the time, and hard to confirm even now.)
The exception here would be the "Mac vs. PC" spots... which fail on the completely different axis of "everyone thinks the John Hodgman PC character is charming and the Justin Long Mac character is a jackass." :P
I feel like a recovery meeting: "You are not alone! Don't need, don't want anything Apple."