Watch this '80s vision of future tech from Apple, and be glad for what didn't come true

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Looks like the fake commercials from Paul Verhoeven movies, especially RoboCop, which is from 1987 too.

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This is equal parts Ballmer-weak inside jokey, fascinatingly dated, and creepily prescient/parallelscient. So yes, Robocopian as heck. Bravo, 1987 Apple marketing people.

I’m not sure their “serious” future visions of a similar vintage are any better, though. I guess we know now why Apple prefers to keep their visions of the future better hidden before making sure they can pull it off.

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I want a Gravenstein Plus!

I also want a Galabook and a Honey Crisp Pro.

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Reminiscent of the movie “Amazon Women on the Moon” which came out in 1987.

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This sure looks like the kind of wacky video that’d get shown at internal corporate meetings or the big company Christmas party. With all of its inside jokes, I doubt this was meant for the general public.

Although back in the 80s, I always expected Apple to follow the Macintosh with other product lines named after apple varieties.

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That was pretty creepy.

Although I could go for a pair of goggles with those mini floppy discs.

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The discs are called “SD cards” these days. :stuck_out_tongue:

A pair of augmented-reality (or pass-through immersive VR) goggles would be definitely nice. Especially if you’d decide to ignore the naysayers and haters calling you “gogglehole” or “ARhole” or whatever their cleverness could come up with.

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I had not seen this, but before I even started it I knew that it was going to be yet another John Sculley joint talking about how great Apple’s stuff was going to be, not how great it was at the time. (See also: Sculley’s “Knowledge Navigator” video, which also talked about how great the future would be.) What the nineties were actually known for, of course, was the rise of Microsoft, thanks in no small part to Sculley’s knuckling under to pressure to ease off its threatened suit against MS for imitating the Mac OS in Windows. It’s especially amusing that 1997 turned out to be the year that Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Sculley long since having gotten the boot himself.

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Today when I look at these videos I can’t help but think of the computers sweet talking everyone while secretly plotting their revenge.

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I noticed the musical styling reminiscent to Star Trek: the Next Generation

I guess Commodore (and/or Atari) was their big competitor then noting that Jack Tramiel quip of him opening a restaurant.

This was a year or so after Jobs was booted out. Glad he came back if that was their ultimate view going into 2000.

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Perhaps the funniest part is the suggestion that customer input shapes the product - doesn’t apple produce some of the least customizable technological products?

They certainly did nail the eventual massive size of the company!

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I am fairly certain that they meant that customer input shapes the product design process. That’s why their philosophy has often been that further customization is not necessary.

The real 1997 video would have depicted Gil Amelio sweating bullets in a boardroom where movers are taking all the furniture away from under them. “We’re still here, damn it! We’re open for business!”

Sculley did make some dubious decisions, but the Advanced Technology Group were responsible for much of what drew me to the platform in the 1990s.

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