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Apple wasn’t making my work experience more colorful and cool by clever advertising, it was making it actively better with the WIMP interface, new to personal computers at the time, which was a long way more user-friendly than tagging text with layout code. (Obviously Apple pinched the idea from Xerox, but they made it work practically and commercially.)
MS-DOS didn’t catch up for years. Windows 3 was the first useable version. By then, Apple had quite a lock on the creative market, except for high end graphics, which ran on Unix.
We didn’t get the hammer throwing advert in the UK, it was a Superbowl special. At least I never saw it until years later.
Fair enough on that… however, this was also at the intersection of home computing expanding, because the cost was starting to come down. I guess I’m more interested here in the way in which apple was marketing itself as the hip alternative to boring old IBM? They were (and still do) pitch themselves as the brand for an elite class of people who are creatives. The fact that they did make some legitimately useful tools doesn’t change that fact.
At the end of the day, people should use the best tool for whatever job they’re doing, not really base their choices on which is the “coolest” brand… if that makes any sense.
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This makes me wonder if anyone’s done a mashup combining this commercial with the hydraulic press in the original Terminator death scene.
Apple may be taking some flack for this ad, but I think they crushed it.
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And that is the early history of Apple computers, personal beige boxes. It wasn’t until shortly after the introduction of the Macintosh that they became elite trinkets for the creative industries (partly because they were the only computers that could run software that was aimed at creative industries), especially publishing and printing – and if I can remember correctly they were beyond the budget of most, except businesses, and even then the agencies I worked for had Macs for the creative departments and others for the rest of the staff and that continues.
There was (and still is) a degree of snobbishness, envy and division created and that was reflected in Apple’s marketing. Which came first, my faulty memory (and lack of excitement about computers) seems to think that the division was. But I could be wrong/biased. TBH we could now work on virtually any computer, but the draw of Apple is strong, strong enough to persuade accountants that Apples are a requirement.
Which, was, you know, my point, which I’ve said SEVERAL times here… too bad people seem intent on ignoring that part…
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I beg your pardon, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that the elitism dated from Apple PCs not from more business-targeted Apple Macintoshes.
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