Vintage 80s Apple Ads Resurfacing on YouTube

They should bring back this campaign ;)

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That second commercial is actually really clever... loved that ending. :)

You have to hand the crown to apple, they rule.

My Favorite Apple Video...

In 1998, when I first started dating the woman who is now my wife, I let her talk me into buying a Dell when my 5 year old Mac needed to be replaced. Of course, this was RIGHT BEFORE the iMac came out. So, I ordered my Dell with Windows 98 installed on it, and it was a piece of crap right from the start. None of my old peripherals worked properly, even after I spent money buying Adaptec PCI cards with the appropriate connectors. When I'd call tech support, I'd get the runaround, with Dell telling me it was a Windows problem, Microsoft telling me it was an Adaptec problem, and Adaptec telling me the problem was with my old HP scanner (which worked fine with my old Mac just one week earlier). Also, the bootup time was obscene, the default organization of files and folders didn't make any sense, and it just wasn't fun to use. And I won't even start about the viruses and system crashes....

So, after only 3 months of owning it, the iMac had been announced and I saw this video while browsing the internet one night:

iMac G3 promo video - Simplicity Shootout iMac vs. PC (1998) (http://youtu.be/_spF8pHs-Fc)

So, I showed this to my then girlfriend, and as we both laughed (and almost cried), we agreed that I had made a horrible mistake. This video captures, in a nutshell, exactly why the Mac is superior to the PC. Simplicity. We ended up finding someone to pay me slightly more than 50% of what I paid for the Dell, and I promptly got rid of it and bought an iMac. That Dell was the only PC I had ever owned since my parents bought our family's first computer -- an IBM PC (one of the originals...with two floppy drives and no hard drive) back in 1984...coincidentally the same year the original Macintosh was released. Every other computer I've had, from 1987 until present, has been a Mac.

And as I type this post on my 13 inch MacBook Air (Oct. 2010 release), I contemplate when I'm going to get my NEW MacBook Air! That 12 hour battery life with the faster processor and 512 GB SSD sure is tempting! Not to mention that my AppleCare Warranty will be expiring in late October, AND that my 6-year-old daughter is just learning to type and use computers at school (unfortunately, they're DELL PCs -- YUCK!). So, I need to train her properly in the ways of Apple before she gets lured to the dark side. But, if one of us is getting a "new" computer, it might as well be the one who's paying for it, right? Especially, since my 3-year-old MacBook Air is in perfect condition!

Good thread, thanks!

These ads were made three years before I was born.

And I'm not a little kid, I'm 23 years old. I grew up with my parents and grandparents constantly telling me what life was like without computers and cell phones and the internet. What are we going to tell our kids we grew up without? I can't wait to find out.

That second commercial is actually really clever... loved that ending. :)

That frog ad and a few others like it were a big double edged sword for Apple back in the day. While it showed the power of the machine, it also showed political colors to a country just starting to reject Carter and elect Reagan. This kept on going into the launch of the Macintosh where more and more right-leaning folks moved into the Apple boardroom. Many claim his left leaning ads hurt sales.

This pissed off Steve to no end. IMO, this let to a big re-evaluation of his political scene when the Berkeley "Tune in / turn on" types who embraced him at his rise at Apple kicked him to the curb when he was fired form Apple. I bet his NeXT years, like any achieved professional, had him retrospect his youth to sort out what to keep and what to throw away. I mean, he sold a bunch of NeXT stations to the CIA! Where did that change come from?

IMO, what he kept was his art and technology crossover that drove every product that he worked on. He threw away parts of the psychology / psychiatry community that took advantage of him to advance their political agenda. The Xerox PARC alumni and long term hires that started after Steve left where caught in the middle of that.

Looking forward to the movie in August.

In the second video she says that she does not want to dissect a frog because she does not want to hurt a living thing.

I miss the 80's. It was so easy back when I was young.

Marketing is vital for corporations.
Apple has been fortunate to have great marketing teams since the 80s, and look how far it has gotten them :)

Too bad im only 14 and have never seen these before