Forty years ago Steve Jobs revolutionised personal computing by launching the Apple Macintosh, the first PC with a user-friendly mouse and graphical interface that helped the machines enter the everyday lives of people for the first time.
Jobs, playing the showman inventor to perfection in a black suit and silver bow tie, opened a zipper bag in an auditorium in Cupertino, California, on January 24, 1984, and lifted out a lightweight computer that not only operated at the click of a button but also, thrillingly, talked.
Here is a look back at Apple"s revolutionary machine in numbers.
The haunting clip shot by "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott evokes a dystopian world in the style predicted by George Orwell in his classic novel, "1984".
Though no names were mentioned, the all-powerful "Big Brother" in the clip was a swipe at IBM, which dominated the market at the time.
The Mac was represented by an athlete, shown hurling a sledgehammer at that totalitarian future.
Apple paid a whopping $800,000 ($2.5 million in today"s money) to air the one-minute ad, seen by 77.6 million TV viewers, according to ratings specialist Nielsen.
But it achieved its aim of creating huge hype around the launch.
At the outset, a lack of memory was a common problem with PCs. Within a year Apple had replaced the 128K version with the "Fat Mac" with 512K, offering four times the space.
Both offered a floppy disk drive, but only the compact Mac was all-in-one.
Today"s laptops are featherweights in comparison, with the latest MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros all weighing in at under 2 kg.
In fact, for a personal computer it was quite a lot of money: $2,495 in 1984 is the equivalent of around $7,400 today.
It was $1,000 more than Jobs had initially planned, but development costs, and the $15 million spent on advertising, caused its price to balloon.
These days vintage 128Ks can fetch up to $2,000 at auction.
Even the cardboard box that the first Macs came in seemed to be made of gold -- or so it appeared when someone paid $536 in 2002 on eBay to acquire one such empty box, according to Wired magazine.
The winning bid beat 17 other offers.
According to tech historian Jeremy Reimer, by the end of the year 372,000 units of the history-making model had sold.
In 2023, Apple sold nearly 22 million Macs, including iMac desktops and MacBooks, according to the latest available data from analysts at Gartner and IDC market research groups.
The figures give the company between 8 and 9 percent of the total market for PCs.
First Published: Jan 23, 2024, 13:04
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