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Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac
- gdubs 4y agoCredit 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 4y agoAlso 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.”
- pcurve 4y agoThe 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 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 4y agoYou might like Ted Nelson's Junk Mail Cartons: https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail
- ghaff 4y agoAs 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).
- boraoztunc 4y agoBook 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-sells-ad-by-david-ogilvy-1972-a1b4af7b848c https://borakaizen.medium.com/how-to-create-advertising-that...
- PStamatiou 4y agoThanks for sharing! I’m also a fan of ads from this era and had to tweet about it
- samcheng 4y agoWorth 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 4y agoIs 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 4y agoI 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_to_Steve_Jobs_(1969%E2%80%931994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Hayden#From_first_jobs_t... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/allenstjohn/2012/02/02/the-super-bowl-ad-that-almost-killed-apple/?sh=719ed87e488b https://www.forbes.com/sites/allenstjohn/2012/02/02/the-supe... Edit: fixed typos
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- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoAgreed! 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."
- danielfoster 4y agoIt’s fascinating that two pages of the ads showcase cut-and-paste, a feature notably missing on the first iPhone.
- wmf 4y agoOne might even get the impression that the original Mac and original iPhone had different use cases!
- rchaud 4y agoThey referred to both of them as computers though.
- rileyphone 4y agoSuch is the impact of Larry Tesler - ios software feels very modal (though that might be made more difficult to avoid on the mobile platform).
- SllX 4y agoIt'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.
- MBCook 4y agoLove the back cover.
- niedzielski 4y agoTo those who used this computer and software, was it as easy as the ad claims to create these outputs?
- tppiotrowski 4y agoNot 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.
- JeremyReimer 4y agoI 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 4y ago"Professional" is relative - compared with PC state of the art the Imagewriter was OK - laserprinters weren't really a thing yet for anyone
- scarface74 4y agoLaserWriters came out in 1985
- User23 4y agoOn the software side MacDraw was already there though.
- scarface74 4y agoThe first Apple LaserWriter came out in 1985 - one year after the Mac came out. It was a Postscript printer that supported vector graphics.
- tppiotrowski 4y agoWait, there was an Apple credit card way back in 1984?
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- bombcar 4y agoApple branded cards have existed since long before the Apple Card we have now.
- LASR 4y agoWow. TIL.
- aroman 4y agoAre 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 4y agoApple had a credit card issued by Barclaycard from at least 2011 to 2019.
- CharlesW 4y agoHere's 1986's "Apple Credit Card" and "Apple Business Credit Card": https://www.cultofmac.com/614988/apple-credit-card-histor/ https://www.cultofmac.com/614988/apple-credit-card-histor/
- bombcar 4y agoAs 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.
- aabajian 4y agoI 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.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> 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.
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- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoToday this would likely be unprecedentedly low.
- FPGAhacker 4y agohuh. I guess I never knew what yuppies was short for. Dinks I understood to be "double income, no kids."
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- thrdbndndn 4y agoNot old enough to use it, but that mouse looks like an ergonomic nightmare.
- emeril 4y agoback then you were lucky to even have a mouse
- williamscales 4y agolucky indeed! in my day we only had a cardboard box with a couple of rotary encoders taped on
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoStill more ergonomic that the one Apple sells today.
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- wincent 4y agoEven 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.
- ndiddy 4y agoThe 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&story=Price_Fight.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- lostlogin 4y agoTheir early pricing was very high, even when you don’t factor in inflation. It worked out ok for them long term I suppose.
- kristopolous 4y agoAlmost 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple (available at https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john 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 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 4y ago> 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.
- mhneu 4y agoSo 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-magazine 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 4y agoSo 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 4y agoThese 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.
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- ksec 4y agoSadly 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 4y agoHow 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.
- mrb 4y agoSo what's the reference behind "Fire Beaumont" on the chart on page 99 ?
- js2 4y agoI 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 4y agoBerlin Alexanderplatz was the epitome of art house cool in 1984.
- d13 4y agoBerlin 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.
- rio517 4y agoI'm amazed at how few ad pages there were.
- asimpleusecase 4y agoI was listening to a podcast from 2019 on the early days of the iPhone development https://overcast.fm/+BlzEp7Ihw 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.
- pcurve 4y agoWhat a wonderful site. A lot more vintage apple ads https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/international/apple 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/international/apple/pics/annual83-mail https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
- tomcam 4y agoIt 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.
- spockz 4y agoOr 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.
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- iso1631 4y agoCome 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 4y agoWow, 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.
- seydor 4y ago"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 4y agoI mean I have like 5 computers. I do feel sorry for the 4 humans who don't get to vote because of me
- PostOnce 4y agoThe original Apple Card: https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/international/apple/mac-newsweek/pics/page113 https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio... *note: you must be a homeowner to finance a Macintosh. (fine print at bottom of page)
- jaypeg25 4y agoI caught that too. Had no idea that was ever a thing.
- yreg 4y agoInteresting how little padding they used in those times. E.g. page 17 looks totally broken by current trends.
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- spiffytech 4y agoIt's fascinating that cut and paste were noteworthy enough to each merit full-page ads.
- pagade 4y agoUser manual turned into ad. Amazing.
- tapland 4y agoThe keyboards (with text) at the beginning on Page 17 looks a lot like the keyboard disussion today =)
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- meerita 4y agoI miss that Apple so much.
- meerita 4y agoTo 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.
- thread_id 4y agoAll 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 4y ago"Good artists copy, great artists steal"
- zinekeller 4y agoYeah, and OP definitely conveniently "forgot" Xerox STAR which was the mother of GUI (and which both Macintosh and Windows were inspired from).
- Waterluvian 4y agoI 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 4y agoYeah, 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.
- jscipione 4y agoRonald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale 525-13 in the 1984 election, so the ad space would have been a waste anyway.
- zeckalpha 4y agoI wish I could get an Apple Card issued today that looked like this. https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/international/apple/mac-newsweek/pics/page113 https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...
- ryukafalz 4y ago> 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoEven 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.
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- ndom91 4y agoLove that the line of credit / Apple Card thing only required "being a homeowner and having been at your job for over 2 years"
- notjustanymike 4y agoThose 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.
- thelittleone 4y agoPage 14 is a very pleasant read in terms of marketing copy. https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/international/apple/mac-newsweek/pics/page14 https://aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/ads/internatio...