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Jan 23, 2009 | 4
Hard to believe it's been 25 years since Apple's slick TV spot, which aired during the third quarter of an otherwise forgettable Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Washington Redskins, ushered in the era of the Macintosh. The commercial depicts a drab future for humanity (in which, for some inexplicable reason, everyone is bald) a la George Orwell's 1984, featuring rows of gray-clad people complacently listening to "Big Brother" on a telescreen until a woman dressed in bright orange shorts rushes into the room, smashing the tedium with a well-placed throw of her Olympic-style hammer. (YouTube, of course, has the clip if you care to reminisce.)
This commercial, which ran two days before Apple's Macintosh hit the market, was a harbinger of the company's larger-than-life (and highly successful, for the most part) approach to selling technology. The first Macintosh was the original all-in-one personal computer, featuring a nine-inch (22.9-centimeter) monitor, floppy disk drive and eight-megahertz Motorola 68000 microprocessor sitting in a beige plastic tower. Its price tag: $2,500.
Jan 14, 2009 | 2
Apple CEO Steve Jobs today told staffers in an email that his failing health has forced him to temporarily step down and hand over his daily duties to a surrogate. The memo comes in the wake of published reports last week—after Jobs was a no-show at the MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco—that he was in ill health.
The computer exec, 53, last week revealed that he was suffering from an unspecified "hormonal imbalance" that had caused severe weight loss and kept him out of the public eye. Jobs was reportedly successfully treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004.
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