On January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs stood in front of an audience for Apple Computer’s annual shareholders meeting to introduce the Macintosh — and the computer said, “Hello.”
Clad in a double-breasted jacket and bowtie, Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of a bag, inserted a floppy disk into the 3.5-inch drive and started up the machine. The computer began to play a program on screen that showcased how this graphical user interface, controlled by a finger click of a mouse, was “insanely great” — not to mention, the computer also turned some typed-out words into spoken text to greet the crowd with, “Hello, I’m Macintosh. It’s great to get out of that bag.” (You can watch the 1984 shareholders meeting at this link from the Internet Archive.)
One of the Macintosh full-page ads from a special issue of Newsweek in 1984 that featured 39 different pages of advertisements for the Apple computer.
The idea of operating an all-in-one home computer this way was so novel that using a mouse became a focus of the massive advertising campaign launched to promote the Macintosh in television commercials and magazines — one that had kicked off with a tease two days earlier with the iconic “1984” Macintosh Super Bowl commercial.
Now, 40 years later, we’re about to enter a new era of computing with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. Apple calls this the spatial computing era, utilizing the space around us for our mixed reality computing work, as spreadsheets and video screens float around in our living room.
The world is very different now than in 1984, and yet there are some parallels between these two moments in history. Consumers today may be asking themselves some of the same questions as four decades ago — a high price for a novel machine leaves folks wondering, “Is it worth it for what it can do? How different will it feel to operate? What programs can I run on it?”
