What new product did Apple Computer launch with a $1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl?
This must have been the greatest TV commercial ever made. Almost a quarter of a century later, I am still amazed by the sheer brilliance of this commercial. Patterned after Orwell’s “1984” the commercial depicts a bleak scene, with people marching lockstep, into an auditorium, while Big Brother delivers a speech. Everything is grey and dreary, except for one athletic woman, carrying a large hammer, being chased by guards. She runs into the auditorium and throws the hammer at the big screen on which Big Brother is shown speaking, just as Big brother finishes his speech. The speech contains subtle symbolic references to the state that the computer industry was in at the time. Big Brother himself was a symbol of IBM, whose original line of PCs was bringing about a consolidation of the computer industry (a “Unification of Thoughts…more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth”) in contrast to the previously-extant mishmash of competing and opposing computer platforms (“…the pests
