[HN Gopher] Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election iss...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for
Mac
Author : gdubs
Score : 315 points
Date : 2022-10-16 03:26 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aresluna.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (aresluna.org)
| ndiddy wrote:
| The problem with Apple's extensive advertising was that they
| ended up having to price the Mac higher than an individual could
| afford so they could cover the marketing budget. Combined with
| the lack of software and the small amount of (non-upgradable)
| RAM, this meant that Mac sales slumped after the initial rush of
| early adopters. More information:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
| lostlogin wrote:
| Their early pricing was very high, even when you don't factor
| in inflation.
|
| It worked out ok for them long term I suppose.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Almost didn't. Apple ][ revenue kept the doors open until I
| think it was 1986 when they were finally break-even on
| Macintosh. And it cost Jobs the company. Then he came in as a
| hail-mary and got $150mil from Microsoft to stay in business
| a few extra months and if he hadn't had those 11 years at
| Next Inc which also went bankrupt, OS X probably wouldn't
| have happened.
|
| The stars aligned for Apple a few times: I think it's Apple
| ][, iTunes, iPhone in that order.
|
| These days we reflect on the Macintosh as a success, but
| texts from the mid-to-late 80s did not and frankly, I trust
| those texts more. A fairly good specimen can be found in this
| 1987 text:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple
| (available at https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john)
|
| Here's an example from my personal library from a 1984 text,
| "The coming computer industry shakeout" which sadly hasn't
| been digitized: http://9ol.es/computer-shakedown-219.jpg
|
| 1984-86 were pretty dark times for Apple if you're to go off
| of what people were saying between 1984-1986.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from
| Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months
|
| This is another HN myth like "cable was once ad free".
|
| Before Amelio was kicked out, he had secured $4 billion in
| financing. If you look at the series of events, it is
| completely illogical thst $150 million could have "saved"
| Apple. The deal happened in 1997. Apple wasn't profitable
| and just barely until 2000-2001. $150 million couldn't have
| saved it. Besides that, a month later, Apple spent $100
| million to buy out PowerComputing's Mac license.
|
| The second myth is that part of the deal was that Microsoft
| agreed to port Office to the Mac. Office was already
| available for the Mac and actually started on the Mac.
|
| Part of the deal was that Microsoft would continue
| supporting the Mac with Office and port IE.
|
| Also Apple and Microsoft were involved in two major legal
| disputes - the "look and feel" lawsuit where Apple accused
| MS of copying the Macs interface and that MS illegally used
| QuickTime code. They agreed to drop the lawsuit and cross
| license patents.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'd like to contest that and hopefully I'll remember to
| do it tomorrow when I'm awake. Their quarterly 10-Ks are
| online from the era. I've gone through them before.
|
| Sorry for not being more engaging, it's late and I'm
| getting kinda dizzy so I should go to bed.
| Udo_Schmitz wrote:
| Here's some material for you to look at:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120729114743/http://news.cn
| et.... "Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2
| billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to
| invest in its core markets of education and creative
| content, Anderson said."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160821150114/http://www.rou
| ghl...
|
| http://time.com/3781557/in-a-private-light-diana-walkers-
| pho... (Picture #10 in slide show)
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2010/05/apple...
|
| "Less than 12 hours before his big announcement, nobody
| here knows yet about the bombshell to come. In fact, Jobs
| is still negotiating it here at the Castle--on a cell
| phone. "Hi, Bill," you hear him say in the echo chamber
| of the old hall. Then his voice drops, and for nearly an
| hour he paces the stage, running through last-minute
| details with Gates. All the while, he leans over his
| computer, paces, lies down on the stage, paces, lurks in
| dark corners, paces and talks, paces and talks.
|
| This is the fateful call for the boy titans of the
| personal-computer revolution, meant to settle the war. At
| one point, talking about Apple, Jobs says, "There are a
| lot of good things, happily--and a lot of screwed-up
| things." Then, to his crew, he yells, "Have we got
| satellite contact with the other side?" Assured this has
| been taken care of, he answers a question from Gates
| about what to wear on the morrow ("I'm just going to wear
| a white shirt," he assures him), and he finally ends the
| conversation with a heartfelt "Thank you for your support
| of this company. I think the world's a better place for
| it." And so that's how Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs
| and Bill Gates, finally seal it--on a cell-phone call.
|
| The deal is vintage Jobs. Amelio began the process of
| repairing relations between the two longtime rivals. But
| once he was out the door at Apple, Jobs contacted Gates
| to try to get talks started again. Gates dispatched his
| CFO, Gregory Maffei, who met Jobs at his home. Jobs
| suggested they go for a walk. Grabbing a couple of
| bottles of mineral water from the fridge, the two took
| off for a stroll around Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. "It
| was an interesting scene," Maffei recalls. "It was a
| pretty radical change for the relations between the two
| companies." The two walked for nearly an hour, through
| Palo Alto's green university area, as they pounded out
| the details of a potential deal. Jobs, Maffei says, was
| "expansive and charming. He said, 'These are things that
| we care about and that matter.' And that let us cut down
| the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and
| they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a
| lot more ability. He didn't ask for 23,000 terms. He
| looked at the whole picture, figured about what he
| needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring
| the Apple people around and sell the deal.""
|
| (From: Steve's Job: Restart Apple by Cathy Booth in Time
| Magazine Aug 18, 1997)
|
| http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3239977/apple-and-
| microsof...
|
| The 1997 cross-license agreement between Microsoft and
| Apple: http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1292505/584.pdf
| [deleted]
| scarface74 wrote:
| Start here: Apple bought PowerComputing for $100 million
| in cash right after the MS deal. That would mean that a
| net $50 million "saved" Apple.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-acquires-power-
| comput...
|
| My timeline for Apple profitability was off.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.
|
| But Apple lost over $1 billion that year. A net $50
| million was a drop in the bucket.
|
| I also misstated that Amelio had obtained working
| capital. It was actually Fred Anderson from the same
| article.
|
| > On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple
| by the board of directors. Fred D. Anderson was the head
| of the directors in short term and obtained short-term
| working capital from the banks in July 1997.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Alright, I'm awake now.
|
| I looked over what I wrote. I think was doing too much
| for dramatic effect.
|
| The history in this thread is excellent. I don't have
| much to add but out of either narcissism or obligation I
| will (I wonder if they are related) and with it open a
| new can of worms, so let's go
|
| if someone was to run Lloyd's algorithm on tech companies
| they'd probably, with the right feature selection find
| nice Gaussian blobs around a number of once great
| companies who faltered. For example, RIM, Palm, DEC,
| Burroughs, Commodore, SGI and Sun. I think a pithy ~100
| word description could describe them all: "Excellent
| teams blindsiding the world with visionary products that
| crash through material reality with the human spirit of
| creativity who are not able to stabilize the fragile
| chemical interplay between market, money, magic and mind.
| Delays and disappointments lead to disasters and
| desertion as the dreams turn into nightmares. The talent
| atrophies and the culture grows bitter. Plans for the
| future are replaced with the nostalgia of the past as the
| once great company grasps in futility at trying to
| reconstruct the fleeting world that once was but can
| increasingly never be again."
|
| This was also Apple's trajectory in the late 90s. The
| confluence of factors that led to its demise and rise
| were many and extraordinary. The MSFT influx is in my
| mind the most memorable. Apple was definitely in
| survival/death mode and could have just coasted and rode
| to the end until they got snatched up by someone like
| say, counterfactually now, Adobe in say 2003. They'd be
| another company on that pile of once great machines of
| the mighty who faltered.
|
| I should probably disclose I've never liked their
| products. I've got an obscure collection too; a magic
| link, newton, nextstation - I had a 1983 pre-production
| mac, early snow-white design language hardware - I've
| never worked there but I think I have pretty deep
| exposure to them and I've always found their stuff to be
| overpriced shoddy ostentatious appliances.
|
| And that's enough gasoline on this fire from me.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > The MSFT influx is in my mind the most memorable.
|
| That's clearly not the case, there is no way that a net
| $50 million made the difference between life and death
| when Apple already had a little bit over $1 billion in
| the bank.
| Twisell wrote:
| Also Next didn't go bankrupt it was acquired by apple for
| 430 millions $ and provided the technical core on which
| modern MacOS and iOS were built.
|
| Another minor company founded by Jobs while he was away
| is Pixar...
|
| Steve Jobs didn't exactly came back at Apple by sneaking
| in shamefully after a lucky coincidence, his come back
| was actually a big deal for those who remember.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Pixar wasn't founded by Jobs, it was spun out of ILM.
| Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull both worked at ILM and were
| responsible for some of the ground-breaking digital
| effects in movies in the early 80s, including the Genesis
| Device simulation in The Wrath of Khan. They also built
| the PIXAR computer for rendering.
|
| Catmull brought in John Lasseter to make animated shorts.
| Lucas had no interest in producing "cartoons," so once he
| had usable hardware, he spun out the ILM digital graphics
| group and as Pixar with investment capital from Steve
| Jobs. Lucas then hired more digital graphics artists who
| were more interested in supporting special effects using
| the rendering tools that had already been developed.
|
| Steve had an interesting relationship with Pixar. He was
| somewhat hands on as chairman of the board, but still had
| a lot of the aggro tendencies that everyone knew from his
| first stint at Apple. Sometimes he would go "street
| bully," including a heated argument over the use of a
| whiteboard with Alvy Ray Smith, an actual founder of
| Pixar, that resulted in Smith's departure.
|
| That said, Steve provided the financing and executive
| deal-making that resulted in Toy Story and the subsequent
| string of the best animated feature films ever made.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have been programming Apple software since 1986.
|
| That means that I have been through _a lot_ of changes, and
| watched Apple expand and contract; numerous times.
|
| I used to regularly get sneers from "PC people," about how
| I was holding onto a "dead baby," and should just let go,
| and learn Windows.
|
| It got fairly infuriating. Geeks can be pretty insulting
| (just spend some time, wandering around the comments of
| this very venue, and we're quite well-behaved, hereabouts).
|
| Kinda glad I stuck it through, though.
| prox wrote:
| Guy Kawasaki also talks about his time at Apple. There were
| definitely problems, I mean Guy was one of the software
| evangelists to get more software getting produced which was
| a BIG problem.
|
| After C64 you got the Amiga (graphics) and Atari ST (music)
| who took a lot of the marketshare for easy to use GUI
| os'es. Also games were big on both. PC was still
| predominantly business until games like Doom and the first
| audioboards/videocards and the CD-ROM.
| Someone wrote:
| > Then he came in as a hail-mary and got $150mil from
| Microsoft to stay in business a few extra months
|
| That was the outcome of a process that started years
| earlier, when Jobs wasn't at Apple. I wouldn't describ3 it
| as _"got"_ , either.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company:
|
| _The lawsuit "Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co.",
| filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco
| Canyon Company used some of the code developed under
| contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows.
| Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft
| on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel
| knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing
| several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their
| effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows.
|
| On March 3, 1995, a Federal judge issued a temporary
| restraining order that prohibited Microsoft from
| distributing its current version of Video for Windows
|
| [...]
|
| In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement
| deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all
| lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the
| "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet
| Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh
| unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape
| browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing
| Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and
| software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase
| $150 million of non-voting Apple stock_
| fulafel wrote:
| The following year in 1985 the Amiga 1000 with all that extra
| graphics hardware apparently cost 1295 USD and Macintosh MSRP
| was 2495 or 1995 depending who you believe.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Amiga folks always overlook Apple's emphasis on user
| experience. The Amiga workbench UI at the time looked like an
| Apple IIe high-res mode if someone had forgotten black and
| white monitors existed. Everything was ugly blue / orange
| combination and the graphics seemed chosen to emphasize pixel
| bulkiness. Put that and the 1985 Finder head to head and the
| user walks out the door with the Mac.
|
| Something like DeluxePaint vs MacPaint would be a much
| different story, easy Amiga win. However, pretty much every
| user considering a computer would need word processing, where
| again the Mac had a rock solid look and feel advantage.
| whartung wrote:
| Yea, I did not like the Amiga. It just felt cheap. The low
| resolution "high res color graphics" were just Not Good
| compared to the crisp B&W Macintosh graphics. GEM for the
| Atari and PC suffered the same problem, it just looked
| terrible. Even Window 1 and 2 looked better than either of
| these.
|
| The singular interesting thing from the Amiga was that you
| could drag down the current screen and reveal a screen
| beneath.
|
| I never spent any time with the Amiga, to be fair, but I
| was off put enough by initial perception to not really even
| want to try.
| [deleted]
| mikotodomo wrote:
| True, but it pushed the computer industry forward.
| Maursault wrote:
| > The problem with Apple's extensive advertising was that they
| ended up having to price the Mac higher than an individual
| could afford so they could cover the marketing budget.
|
| Andy Hertzfeld is indisputably a genius that was at the right
| place at the right time. He's a decent writer, and his easy
| personality shows through his writing style. That said, he was
| a software developer, not a marketing specialist. Advertising
| is only important to sales and image, and little else. I don't
| claim to understand how, because I can barely believe it
| myself, but advertising has a direct correlation to increased
| sales and revenue such that the more that is spent on
| advertising, the more sales and revenue there will be, and this
| is unrelated to product price. Maybe the sales slumped, or
| maybe whatever market there was for the 128K Macintosh in 1984
| was quickly saturated. Maybe even the price, as high as it was,
| wasn't high enough. It is also possible that with less
| advertising and an amazing affordable price that Mac would have
| failed and Apple would have gone under. It's hard to say, but
| what did happen is that Mac succeeded and Apple survived, no
| worse for the wear for spending a lot on advertising and
| selling Mac at much higher prices, at least during the
| mid-1980s.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It should have been cheaper. The thing you're overlooking is
| that the 1984 Mac was not actually a market success. Success
| required more memory and the LaserWriter. The Apple II
| carried Apple until sometime in the late 80's when people
| finally started buying Macs for desktop publishing.
| Maursault wrote:
| > The thing you're overlooking is that the 1984 Mac was not
| actually a market success.
|
| You are mistaken. "The Macintosh was the first successful
| mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a
| graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse."[1]
| 70K were shipped within the first 100 days of the
| announcement,[2] which is a sale every two minutes every
| hour of the day for more than three months, generating
| $174.6M in revenue and representing fully 1% of the
| existing home computer market in just over 3 months. That
| is actually market success by any measure.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#1984:_Debut
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090821105822/http://www.i
| sland...
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| I was listening to a podcast from 2019 on the early days of the
| iPhone development https://overcast.fm/+BlzEp7Ihw. It was with
| Ken Kocienda. The interview is long 1.5 hours but toward the end
| he actually addresses cut and paste issue on iPhone. I found it
| interesting.
| aurhther wrote:
| pcurve wrote:
| What a wonderful site.
|
| A lot more vintage apple ads
| https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
|
| Love this particular one that talks about obtaining stock quote,
| make travel arrangement, and scan New York Times. In 1983!
| https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
| tomcam wrote:
| It was electrifying. Understand that by 1984 there were millions
| of Americans using computers with a command line interface. While
| they could all do game graphics, you always started out in text
| mode and had to learn incantations that are familiar to many
| users of this site but which are no longer a part of most users'
| daily life: dir, cd, del, etc.
|
| Seeing how dramatically different a computer experience could be
| was like opening a door to an alternate universe for people. The
| day after the Super Bowl in 1984 when their famous big Brother
| commercial ran, my girlfriend's computer-illiterate father
| announced to us "I know how to use a computer now" and of course
| I knew exactly why.
| rchaud wrote:
| Yes, the shift of consumer computers from command-line only to
| graphical interfaces would have been bigger than the Wizard of
| oz moment where the movie transitions from monochrome to
| colour.
|
| I contrast this to Meta VR's comically atrocious demos and
| wonder what happened.
| nomel wrote:
| > I contrast this to Meta VR's comically atrocious demos and
| wonder what happened.
|
| How so? They're showing the best with the limits of current
| mobile technology that can maintain 75Hz. Cloud VR isn't here
| yet, because 5G isn't here yet. In 5 years, some of those
| limits will be gone, 10 years even more, but it would be
| silly if they waited 10 years to start.
|
| I think part of the problem is that you can't take a picture
| of VR and show it to someone. It doesn't translate. Things
| that look ugly in 2D look much better in 3D. This is a _huge_
| problem with VR game trailers.
|
| For example, the new avatars looked much better, "in person",
| than with 2d screenshots. 3d is a very real part of our
| perception that I think many things can benefit from,
| especially data visualization.
| rchaud wrote:
| There is a aphorism that goes like "good technology is
| indistuishable from magic".
|
| What gain is there in publicizing these half assed updates
| that don't inspire any consumer confidence?Except to maybe
| vested parties like advertisers and, shudder to think,
| metaverse real estate agents.
| nomel wrote:
| I'm sorry, but no technology has started in its final
| state. Metas communication has been very very clear that
| we're in the infancy of it all. See the latest keynote
| for multiple examples.
| spockz wrote:
| Or what about `himem`? I remember I had to do that command
| first. Otherwise, something in railroad tycoon or Civ would not
| work. I don't recall exactly what it was, the pointer, high res
| colour graphics, or sound or maybe the combination of the
| above. I just knew I had to type that first. Didn't have a clue
| at the time what it was.
| ghaff wrote:
| To be fair, the Mac alternative at the time was "Don't do
| that." DOS and the PC (and add-ons like expanded memory)
| provided a bunch of ways for sophisticated users to do things
| that weren't quite possible with stock configurations.
| (Basically there was memory between 640K and 1MB that could
| be used in various ways but it required the right
| incantations.)
|
| My general recollection from being a DOS power user (and
| developer) and a very sometime Mac user in that era was that
| Macs were less likely to be "problematic" but when something
| did go wrong, you had far fewer tools and observability to
| work around the problem.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| That period didn't last very long, though -- by 1986, the
| Mac Plus had a megabyte of memory standard, and still a
| flat address space -- no HIMEM required.
|
| On the second point, generally the hardware was reliable,
| and Mac users had tools available to diagnose software
| issues. There just wasn't any printing stuff to a console.
| yardie wrote:
| The Mac from that era had a built-in hardware debugger.
| Literally pressing the button on the front of the case
| dropped you straight into Macsbugs. Something I used
| extensively to crack software copy protection.
|
| If you knew Macsbugs, ResEdit and Codewarrior you had
| complete control of your software and hardware.
| eludwig wrote:
| >>Literally pressing the button on the front of the case
| dropped you straight into Macsbugs.
|
| Or better yet, TMON[1]! What an amazing debugger. I spent
| many hours in there, trying to figure out why the 64K ROM
| was stepping all over registers that were supposed to be
| protected by particular ROM traps. (to be fair, there
| were not too many of these, and they were all eventually
| patched by system updates)
|
| [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1400-tmon
| iso1631 wrote:
| Come dos 6 there were menu options in config.sys you could
| use to load different parts of your hardware depending on
| what you wanted, they also could do different things in
| autoexec.bat too. Before that you could just have different
| boot floppies.
|
| My memory had himem.sys as a config.sys option though, with
| various numbers you could pass to it. EMM386 was another one
| too.
|
| It was tricky to work out what you could do - a lot of trial
| and error, this was in the pre-internet time (at least for
| the typical home user), so things tended to come from hints
| in magazines.
| rchaud wrote:
| Wow, I remember this! As a kid, I remember taking my
| computer to an IT shop asking how to run a copy of Ultima
| VI on my Pentium II MMX PC. The tech there had it for a
| week, and they figured it out by setting up autoexec.bat so
| that I had to allow/disallow some processes from booting
| one by one.
|
| Apparently one of those tricks was reducing the amount of
| available memory, or something like that. That was the hack
| that got U6 to boot and be playable at a normal speed.
|
| This would have been in 1998 or so, so my memories of the
| exact fix are pretty faint.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I would urge developers to also take a look at the early
| "Inside Macintosh" series, which tried to explain Apple's Human
| Interface Guidelines to programmers. Take a particular look at
| Vol1-Chapter 2 [1] to see how hard Apple worked to explain how
| to design consistent and usable apps. All of this advice
| ("avoid modals", "group commands in menus") seems trivial to us
| now: that's how GUIs have worked for most of our lives. But
| prior to Mac most apps looked like vim. These ideas had to be
| designed and then _taught_ , and Apple spent a huge amount of
| effort on those books.
|
| [1]
| https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum...
| ghaff wrote:
| Also worth reading is Tog on Interface by an early Apple
| employee who was Apple's Human Interface Evangelist in that
| period. One particularly interesting essay goes into the
| issues associated with the way that developers are used to
| dealing with abstract models in a way that many users aren't.
| (He bases his argument in part of Meyers Briggs which is
| astrology to some degree--but the basic point stands.)
| zeckalpha wrote:
| I wish I could get an Apple Card issued today that looked like
| this.
| https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > You must be a homeowner and show proof that you've been at
| your current job at least two years.
|
| Wow, was this typical at the time? I've been working for about
| a decade but I only would have just qualified for this recently
| as I've been renting.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't think so?
|
| I'm not exactly sure just what the "Apple Credit Card" was...
| but from the copy, it seems like it was really just a loan,
| not an actual credit card that could be used anywhere else.
| (It says 10% down, too, which isn't how actual credit cards
| work.)
|
| Since it required another credit card, seems like they
| "outsourced" the work of checking creditworthiness to them
| (clever). I'm wondering if the homeownership was some form of
| collateral? Because while it would have been fine for most of
| the country, it would have eliminated a large proportion of
| people in Manhattan mainly.
|
| (Although Manhattan was very different in 1984, much of it
| not nearly as gentrified as today. Not sure if lots of
| business people were renting on the Upper East Side, of if
| they mostly owned co-ops there or a house in Westchester or
| Connecticut.)
| latchkey wrote:
| Even today, in Vietnam, 'credit cards' are just secured
| debt cards. You get a card, it looks and works just like a
| regular credit card. But, your max balance on the card is
| the amount that you've deposited into a special time locked
| account that they can pull from if you don't pay your bill
| every month.
|
| This is how countries with no credit report system work and
| probably similar to early days of credit cards in the US.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| IIRC, early credit cards weren't tied to a pre-paid
| account, but you were generally required to pay the
| balance every month.
| yardie wrote:
| Those were called charge cards [0]. When I was younger I
| didn't know the difference and thought everything was a
| credit card. Imagine my surprise when I bought my
| university books on my AMEX charge card and got a bill
| for the full amount due in 30 days. It was a terrifying
| lesson. They also had low or no credit score limits so a
| bunch of college friend were surprised when we applied
| and got a card just being 18, no income, and no credit
| history.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card
| rchaud wrote:
| The "Apple Card" in this example is just a store charge
| card, of which there are many. Macy's, Banana Republic etc,
| will all offer these, but they're only usable at the
| retailer that issued it.
| pagade wrote:
| User manual turned into ad. Amazing.
| mhneu wrote:
| So great!
|
| Today, this wouldn't even be possible - Newsweek doesn't even
| have a print edition.
|
| (Also, just as bad: Newsweek is now a zombie publication who sold
| its name and trademark and has become a fairly right-wing
| operation)
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/158968/newsweek-rise-zombie-...
|
| _Amid a larger reckoning about the role of journalism in
| legitimizing anti-democratic ideas, Newsweek had largely stayed
| out of notice until Eastman's op-ed. Newsweek claims that it is
| just asking questions, but its faux innocence is undercut by
| Hammer's credentials and the ideological tilt of most of its
| contributors. Newsweek, the magazine you once read at the
| dentist, is like a [...] version of the opinion section of The
| Wall Street Journal._
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| So it's the NYT opinion section without journalism? I don't
| mean to be glib but this is what I've assumed happened to all
| of the news magazines. They already were this, and the winds
| shifted for all of them.
| rchaud wrote:
| These magazines exist only because of the value of the fading
| goodwill they still have. I'm an older millennial and
| remember large bookstores, so TIME, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek
| are all still in my brain as mastheads of general-interest
| commentary.
|
| The reality is that ownership of these names have changed
| hands so many times, and been through so many restructurings,
| they have no clear editorial voice or clear target audience
| anymore. They are chasing ad dollars, affiliate link bucks
| and "contributor" programs to churn out tons of filler to
| throw more ads on to.
|
| The book "Disrupted" by Dan Lyons (book about Newsweek editor
| who gets fired and takes an ill-fated job at Hubspot) talks
| about how writers used to have decades-long careers at
| publications that let them create a clear voice that
| persisted over time. Those times are long gone.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Page 14 is a very pleasant read in terms of marketing copy.
|
| https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
| [deleted]
| PostOnce wrote:
| The original Apple Card:
|
| https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
|
| *note: you must be a homeowner to finance a Macintosh.
|
| (fine print at bottom of page)
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| I caught that too. Had no idea that was ever a thing.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Those were the good old days; Newsweek got utterly destroyed by
| the internet. When I was there, the only full page buys on the
| website were for full page scabies medicine takeovers. Yes, those
| ads were exactly what you're imagining.
| MBCook wrote:
| Love the back cover.
| ksec wrote:
| Sadly a very different Apple to what they are today. Even just on
| the Marketing and Advertising, modern day Apple seems to have
| lost its touch.
| tchaffee wrote:
| How so? They are now the most valuable company in human
| history. I guess if you're saying the marketing doesn't appeal
| to you personally that's fair. But it clearly has widespread
| appeal to others.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think this marketing is amazing but I feel that it actually
| falls quite short in some places that today's Apple wouldn't
| repeat.
|
| For example, one page rags on IBM and needing to know all this
| tech jargon to use it, but that with a Macintosh you don't...
| except immediately after it decides now is the appropriate time
| to talk about (and show) microchips and their names.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Yeah, the discussion of the 32-bit 68k being far superior to
| the 16-bit 8088 _immediately after touting "no jargon
| necessary"_ made me laugh.
|
| Today's Apple sometimes doesn't put its actual tech specs in
| its marketing other than storage sizes (the most tangible to
| non-tech users), such as with the iPhone. Whenever I get a new
| iPhone, I have to look up the hardware specs.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Not old enough to use it, but that mouse looks like an ergonomic
| nightmare.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Still more ergonomic that the one Apple sells today.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| emeril wrote:
| back then you were lucky to even have a mouse
| williamscales wrote:
| lucky indeed! in my day we only had a cardboard box with a
| couple of rotary encoders taped on
| tapland wrote:
| The keyboards (with text) at the beginning on Page 17 looks a lot
| like the keyboard disussion today =)
| meerita wrote:
| I miss that Apple so much.
| meerita wrote:
| To contextualize why: That Apple was founded with the idea of
| hacking everything. Being rebel. The current Apple is founded
| with other mindset, the mindset of trying to be cool to
| everyone.
|
| Old Apple was set into complete radical ideas, new Apple is
| just an iteration of the same product again and again (iOS
| basically looks quite like the old iOS 7) and so on with the
| rest of the product line.
|
| Old Apple set values for everyone. New Apple only adheres to
| progressive ideology.
|
| Old Apple had products that looked differently for home users,
| and pro users, new Apple have products that look like the same
| no mater what type of product you buy.
|
| There's more, of course, but the new Apple to me is boring in
| everything.
| mrb wrote:
| So what's the reference behind "Fire Beaumont" on the chart on
| page 99 ?
| js2 wrote:
| I would guess there's some inside jokes in the copy. How did
| _Berlin Alexanderplatz_ end up as one of the baby 's favorite
| movies on page 95? And page 94 has the names of a bunch of
| Apple employees as contacts.
| d13 wrote:
| Berlin Alexanderplatz was the epitome of art house cool in
| 1984.
| d13 wrote:
| Berlin Alexanderplatz was the epitome of art house cool in
| 1984. It had very few screenings in select theatres and
| required dedication to sit through till the end, so there was
| a bit status acquired in having seen it.
| niedzielski wrote:
| To those who used this computer and software, was it as easy as
| the ad claims to create these outputs?
| [deleted]
| scarface74 wrote:
| This reminds me of the parody Apple ad from SNL. "The Power to
| Crush the other kids"
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/bq4ucw/mcinto...
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| Yes. Bits and pieces were pretty rough. But it was better than
| what existed before (Wordstar, XYWrite and embedding
| typesetting codes, etc.) but workable.
|
| By the time Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator and the Laserwriter
| arrived, it was revolutionary.
| jameshart wrote:
| Yes, with one possible exception: it's not clear how a typical
| user would have gotten a scanned photograph of a baby onto a
| Mac in 1984.
|
| The example output other than that though consists of images
| easily produced in MacDraw or MacPaint, copy-pasted into
| MacWrite documents for layout. All the fonts used are built-in
| Mac system fonts.
|
| And the big game changers that made that possible for a user
| with minimal training were WYSIWYG onscreen graphics, universal
| copy/paste (plus the 'scrapbook'), and consistent availability
| of 'undo'.
|
| Also not to understate the value of the Finder, with folders
| and documents that you could _see_ , and the clever undoable
| 'wastebasket' metaphor that also gave users confidence about
| what files were there, what files they were operating on, and
| what files they were deleting.
|
| It was completely gamechanging.
| kmos17 wrote:
| It was revolutionary, I remember at first feeling like I was
| really missing the command line and oddly feeling constrained
| by the ui, but for graphic design it opened up a world of
| possibilities. Things like a mouse and pointer with
| copy/cut/paste and the ability to select pixels and move them
| around was ground breaking to me. As others have noted it
| needed the launch of the laserwriter printer to make it a full
| desktop publishing solution.
|
| It also came with instruction booklets similar to these ads and
| the overall feel of it was an advertising/branding stroke of
| genius in my opinion. It was the first time I felt a computer
| had real potential as a creative tool. As a creative it felt
| like it opened up a world of possibilities, a bit like a
| digital version of walking in an art supply store.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Not really. Bitmaps were very rare at the time and without
| internet access it was very hard to source clip art for
| visually appealing documents like the ones shown in the ads.
| zerohp wrote:
| Clip art collections were sold on floppy disk for every
| platform with a graphic printer.
|
| The Print Shop came out the same year as the Macintosh and
| was ported to most platforms.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you
| were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which
| would technically be possible, if you were already a good
| artist.
|
| But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--
| printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix
| printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any
| case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very
| professional.
|
| A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font
| software and built their first laser printer, that's when
| everything changed.
| Taniwha wrote:
| "Professional" is relative - compared with PC state of the
| art the Imagewriter was OK - laserprinters weren't really a
| thing yet for anyone
| scarface74 wrote:
| LaserWriters came out in 1985
| scarface74 wrote:
| The first Apple LaserWriter came out in 1985 - one year
| after the Mac came out. It was a Postscript printer that
| supported vector graphics.
| User23 wrote:
| On the software side MacDraw was already there though.
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| The Laserwriter was one of the first accessible laser
| printers. And also the first with Postscript. It was super
| expensive (easily more than the Macintosh needed to print
| to it) but it was revolutionary.
|
| The only other common option was the early HP laser
| printers, but no Postscript.
| erickhill wrote:
| If you had some talent/training - absolutely.
|
| In the 80s my high school journalism class used an ancient
| typesetting machine in order to make our newspaper. We would
| print things out and put things on giant white poster board
| with glue sticks that would later get photographed and
| converted to printed pages.
|
| After one summer we returned to school and entered class. My
| journalism teacher, Mrs. Forehand, beamed and beckoned us to a
| back room.
|
| The typesetting machine had been replaced with 2 Macintosh
| computers, one equipped with a MASSIVE 20MB hard drive.
| Inspired by Alien, we called that machine "Mother". We also had
| a laser printer for test prints.
|
| Suddenly we could print out pages that were 100% perfect,
| without any x-acto blades or glue. It was stunning.
|
| At home I had a Commodore 64 (with WAY better sound and color
| graphics). But I could see instantly at school I was dealing
| with a "professional" machine that was way out of my family's
| league budget-wise. There was no game scene from what I could
| tell, but I knew deep down it was a game changer.
|
| And I knew the ground had shifted under my feet.
| [deleted]
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Wait, there was an Apple credit card way back in 1984?
| bombcar wrote:
| Apple branded cards have existed since long before the Apple
| Card we have now.
| aroman wrote:
| Are you saying there have been more than just the one
| referenced in this ad and the current Apple Card? As far as I
| can tell, these two are the only Apple branded cards that
| have ever existed.
| bboreham wrote:
| Apple had a credit card issued by Barclaycard from at least
| 2011 to 2019.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Here's 1986's "Apple Credit Card" and "Apple Business
| Credit Card": https://www.cultofmac.com/614988/apple-
| credit-card-histor/
| bombcar wrote:
| As mentioned Apple has had various credit deals with credit
| cards before. And mainly for the same goal - get you to buy
| a Mac. The Apple Card now is distinct because they really
| are encouraging it as a general use card beyond just Apple
| Store purchase.
| LASR wrote:
| Wow. TIL.
| foodstances wrote:
| And like the original Macintosh, training for it came on
| cassette
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/185271683581
| [deleted]
| aabajian wrote:
| I especially like what is being printed out:
|
| _In America, the "Yuppies" -- Young Urban Professionals -- are
| having babies at an unprecedented rate. And literally nothing is
| too good for these infants of the affluent. In fact, they're
| called Gourmet Babies! So we propose to offer traditional Yuppie
| foods -- sushi, pasta salads, brie cheeses, etc. -- in baby food
| form._
|
| That business model work work _today_. Say what you will about
| Apple, they really know their target demographic.
| jhbadger wrote:
| That sort of thing carried over into Jobs' next company NeXT.
| Look at the left hand page (linked below) and zoom in. It's a
| press release for a new (fictional) blues album that would
| appeal to the "hip" audience NeXT was hoping to target.
|
| https://archive.org/details/NeXTSTEP_User_Guide_1994/page/n3...
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| I imagine this terminology was also carefully chosen as a
| trendy word that would catch the audience's attention as a
| "mass media in-joke". In 1984, the kind of person who read
| Newsweek would certainly know term "yuppies", there was a bit
| of a panic in that time period about all these young folks
| moving to cities and then gentrifying neighborhoods with their
| high-paying jobs (typically in finance). Of course, it was
| precisely the yuppies who Apple needed to buy the Mac, what
| with their disposable income and progressive attitude toward
| technology.
|
| Funny enough, Newsweek's final cover of 1984 declared the year
| to be "The Year of the Yuppie":
|
| https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/the-doonesbury-collec...
|
| The term peaked shortly after the time of this ad, as shown
| here in Google ngrams viewer:
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Yuppies&year_s...
| cercatrova wrote:
| And today, Apple _still_ caters to that market, only now the
| yuppies are from Silicon Valley or work in tech.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > That business model work work _today_.
|
| I'm not sure the opening premise is true:
|
| >> In America, the "Yuppies" -- Young Urban Professionals --
| are having babies at an unprecedented rate.
| [deleted]
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Today this would likely be _unprecedentedly low_.
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| huh. I guess I never knew what yuppies was short for. Dinks I
| understood to be "double income, no kids."
| lostlogin wrote:
| Ahh, that's better sounding than the Sitcom lifestyle. Single
| Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I've never heard that before. That's fantastic.
| gdubs wrote:
| Credit to @Stammy on Twitter who shared this over there. Thought
| everyone here would find this pretty cool. I'm a sucker for this
| era of advertising. This is a particularly beautiful spread, and
| super cool to see a snapshot of that moment in time and how Apple
| was positioning this brand new product.
| klodolph wrote:
| Also a sucker for this kind of advertising. Advertising used to
| have a lot more copy. I have a book full of this stuff from
| Taschen called, appropriately, "The Copy Book."
| ghaff wrote:
| As I recall (it's been years), David Ogilvy's Confessions of
| an Ad Man has a bunch of examples of this. Yes, a lot of
| advertising used to be very copy heavy and that's almost
| disappeared (or at least migrated to other forms like content
| marketing).
| pcurve wrote:
| The copy heavy ad style also seemed to have influenced Korean
| PC magazine ads in 1980s
| https://www.comworld.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=48910
|
| 80s was really exciting time for PC because it was pre-
| mainstream.
|
| You savored everything that you can about it, including ad
| copies. Good times.
| rl3 wrote:
| You might like Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons:
|
| https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail
| boraoztunc wrote:
| Book noted, thanks. I also enjoy reading: How to Create
| Advertising That Sells Ad by David Ogilvy [1972]
|
| https://borakaizen.medium.com/how-to-create-advertising-
| that...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Agreed! I was also reminded how Apple's marketing has been so
| good for nearly 40 years - if you look at other tech ads from
| the early 80s, they're nearly always overloaded with tech
| jargon and don't nearly speak as well to the "what can I create
| with this?" question that Apple does.
|
| Also, though, it's always interesting to reflect on the ways
| society has changed. I am 100% sure no copy editor would allow
| "Goo Goo Gai Pan" to be the name of their fake baby food today,
| nor lines like "Yuppie generation now breeding like bunnies."
| PStamatiou wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I'm also a fan of ads from this era and had
| to tweet about it
| samcheng wrote:
| Worth reading "Ogilvy on Advertising" if you're into this
| stuff. I know Ogilvy & Mathers (famous advertising firm) had
| Apple as an account in the mid 80s.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Is this a fact? I know that Ogilvy & Mather did a lot of
| famous work for IBM, while Apple's main agency was
| Chiat/Day for years, if not decades since at least 1983.
| Chiat/Day created the iconic "1984" TV ad as well as the
| "Think Different" campaign, among lots of other famous
| Apple ads.
|
| There's a great book "Chiat/Day - the first twenty years"
| with a lot of ads for Apple and other brands.
| Anon4Now wrote:
| I was curious about the sales impact of the 1984 ad, so I
| did a little googling. It turns out you're right (see [1]
| and [2]).
|
| Steve Hayden created the 1984 ad while at Chiat-Day. He
| later went on to work for Ogilvy, so that's probably
| where the mis-attribution came from.
|
| What's interesting is that he's the same person who
| created the Lemmings ad a year later. The 1984 ad
| resulted in a huge boom in sales. The Lemmings ad did
| just the opposite. Apple closed a bunch of plants and had
| a big layoff. Then Jobs left Apple. weird turn of events.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Hayden#From_first
| _jobs_t...
|
| [2]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/allenstjohn/2012/02/02/the-
| supe...
|
| Edit: fixed typos
| rchaud wrote:
| I have Ogilvy on Advertising, found it cheap at a used book
| store.
|
| The book is worthwhile for all the examples of real ads
| done by his agency. The writing itself is nice, but hugely
| out of date, as it describes a pre-internet, largely brand
| and image-driven approach to creative ads.
| [deleted]
| yreg wrote:
| Interesting how little padding they used in those times.
|
| E.g. page 17 looks totally broken by current trends.
| ndom91 wrote:
| Love that the line of credit / Apple Card thing only required
| "being a homeowner and having been at your job for over 2 years"
| danielfoster wrote:
| It's fascinating that two pages of the ads showcase cut-and-
| paste, a feature notably missing on the first iPhone.
| SllX wrote:
| It's been 15 years. You can let some grudges go. If you're
| still using that phone as your daily driver though, I have some
| questions.
| wmf wrote:
| One might even get the impression that the original Mac and
| original iPhone had different use cases!
| rchaud wrote:
| They referred to both of them as computers though.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Such is the impact of Larry Tesler - ios software feels very
| modal (though that might be made more difficult to avoid on the
| mobile platform).
| jscipione wrote:
| Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale 525-13 in the 1984 election,
| so the ad space would have been a waste anyway.
| seydor wrote:
| "Through this magazine, we are going to demonstrate the principle
| of democracy as it applies to technology. One person, one
| computer"
|
| Funny how times have changed and all persons are on the same
| computer
| tough wrote:
| I mean I have like 5 computers. I do feel sorry for the 4
| humans who don't get to vote because of me
| wincent wrote:
| Even then, Apple took enough care about every aspect of design,
| materials, and manufacturing that they could non-ironically show
| a high detail photo of the back of the machine on the back cover.
| Not only is it delightfully quirky; it's beautiful, even today.
| rchaud wrote:
| These were done by Chiat/Day, an independent ad agency.
| sbuk wrote:
| The product that Chiat/Day wrote the copy and put the images
| together for wasn't though. _That_ is what I took the GP to
| mean.
| thread_id wrote:
| All that innovation was introduced to the world with Apple and
| then later became standard on Microsoft PCs. It underscores the
| fact that Bill Gates innovated nothing but simply copied every
| body else and sold it to the corporate market.
| rchaud wrote:
| "Good artists copy, great artists steal"
| zinekeller wrote:
| Yeah, and OP definitely conveniently "forgot" Xerox STAR
| which was the mother of GUI (and which both Macintosh and
| Windows were inspired from).
| spiffytech wrote:
| It's fascinating that cut and paste were noteworthy enough to
| each merit full-page ads.
| rio517 wrote:
| I'm amazed at how few ad pages there were.
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