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A few weeks ago, Apple’s longtime ad creator Lee Clow suggestively tweeted, “Gonna be a goodSuper Bowl. Mac’s gonna be 30 :).” People immediately started speculating that the iPhone and iPad maker might air an ad celebrating the Macintosh computer’s birthday. Any fans waiting for an Apple ad on Sunday night were disappointed. On Monday morning, however, the company released an online video that may have been what Clow was hinting at.
“Thirty years ago, we introduced Macintosh. It promised to put technology in the hands of the people,” the eighty-eight-second homage begins, before cycling through snapshots of people from around the world using the computer—from toddlers and children to doctors, researchers, musicians, and photographers. The footage was shot by camera crews in ten countries, all with the iPhone 5s, on a single day: January 24th, thirty years after Steve Jobs introduced the Mac. Ridley Scott, who directed the legendary “1984” Super Bowl commercial that introduced the Macintosh, tapped his son Jake to direct the spot. Clow, the chairman of TBWA Worldwide, Apple’s ad agency then and now, was also involved. The ad was a poignant reminder, particularly for longtime Apple users, of the impact of both the Mac and the personal-computer industry that Apple helped spawn.
But, as beautifully as the video depicted how the company’s products have changed the world, it was also another reminder of how much Apple has changed since those days—not least because the old Apple, under Jobs, looked forward, not backward. “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long,” he had famously said. “Just figure out what’s next.”
In fact, the latest video was the second commemorative video that Apple had released in the past two weeks. That was on top of the birthday promotions on Apple’s home page and in its stores, media interviews with ordinarily inaccessible executives, and a commemorative assembly for employees at Apple’s headquarters.
In some ways, Apple’s celebration is well deserved. As “1984” promised, the Macintosh launch was a watershed moment. Back then, less than eight per cent of households owned a personal computer. Having one in your house made “as much sense as owning your own cruise missile,” Steve Hayden, the copywriter for “1984,” said. No one could fault Apple for taking a moment to appreciate how far it had come. (Even Jobs himself was not above this sort of thing entirely. Ten years ago, he re-mastered the original “1984” commercial to show the main character wearing an iPod and unveiled it during the Macworld conference, in San Francisco.)
When Jobs was ousted in 1985, the impact of his absence on Apple’s business was not immediately obvious. After a slow start, Macintosh sales began rising. Two years after Jobs left, Apple’s annual sales had almost doubled compared to three years earlier, and its gross profit margin was an astonishing fifty-one per cent. Outside appearances suggested that Apple hadn’t missed a beat.
Inside Apple, employees knew differently. Something had changed. “I was let down when Steve left,” Steve Scheier, a marketing manager at Apple from 1982 to 1991, recalled. “The middle managers, the directors, and the vice presidents kept the spirit alive for a long time without his infusion, but eventually you start hiring people you shouldn’t hire. You start making mistakes you shouldn’t have made.” Scheier told me that he eventually grew tired and left. The company had “become more of a business and less of a crusade.”
Apple began celebrating its past glories with commemorative T-shirts, a garden of Macintosh sculptures, and a display of an old Apple I in the cafeteria. Engineers obsessed about getting credited in every program that was released. By the time Jobs returned, twelve years later, to rescue Apple from near bankruptcy, the company was unrecognizable.
So what about now? Apple’s supporters point to the company’s billions of dollars in quarterly profit and its tens of billions in revenue as proof that it continues to thrive. But Apple’s employees again know differently, despite the executive team’s best efforts to preserve Jobs’s legacy. People who shouldn’t be hired are being hired (like Apple’s former retail chief, John Browett, who tried to incorporate big-box-retailer sensibilities into Apple’s refined store experience). People who shouldn’t leave are leaving, or, in the case of the mobile-software executive Scott Forstall, being fired.
Mistakes, in turn, are being made: Apple Maps was a fiasco, and ads, like the company’s short-lived Genius ads and last summer’s self-absorbed manifesto ad, have been mediocre. Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, looks pretty but is full of bugs and flaws. As for innovation, the last time Apple created something that was truly great was the original iPad, when Jobs was still alive. Although the company’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, insists otherwise, Apple seems more eager to talk about the past than about the future. Even when it refers to the future, it is more intent on showing consumers how it hasn’t changed rather than how it is evolving. The thirtieth anniversary of the Macintosh—and the “1984” ad—is not just commemorative. It is a reminder of what Apple has stopped being.
Maybe it was for the best that Apple didn’t air a commemorative ad during the Super Bowl. A nostalgic, backward-looking ad couldn’t come anywhere close to “1984,” which challenged the status quo and started a religion.
Yukari Iwatani Kane is a former Apple beat reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Her book, “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs,” is due out in March.
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