The Mac revolution

Thirty years after 1984, it's Apple that's big brother

Thirty years ago, Americans sat down to watch the pinnacle of the US' sporting year, American football's Superbowl. The game is as famous, if anything, for the fact that its huge television audience is used to launch new advertising campaigns, and sometimes entirely new products. On that cold evening in 1984, television-watchers were treated to something inspired: a short film from the director Ridley Scott, who would go on to win several Oscars, clearly inspired by George Orwell's book 1984. In the advertisement, a giant face on a giant blue-tinged screen, an effective linking of Big Brother and Big Blue - IBM, then the dominant personal computer company - spoke to a legion of sheep-like computer users till it was smashed by a colourful challenger. Apple Macintosh had announced itself to the world in the dramatic style for which it became famous. Immediately, it became the computer of choice for everyone who considered themselves creative: the actor and writer Stephen Fry likes to tell the story of how he was second in line to buy the Macintosh in London, behind only the legendary science-fiction humorist Douglas Adams.

Three decades on, IBM no longer even makes personal computers. But Apple, building on the success and the essence of the Mac, as it came to be known, has become the world's most powerful hardware company. The Macintosh was the first mass-market computer - priced though it was at a prohibitive $2,500 - to use the interface computer users now consider standard: windows, icons, menus, pointers, or WIMPs. IBM never quite realised that software was as important as hardware, and so its own dominance of the computing world eventually gave way to the owners of its operating system. Microsoft, with business acumen that became the envy of the world, quickly adapted Apple's graphical user interface, made it more business-friendly, and began to rule the world.

The story of the Macintosh revolution, however, was not finished. When Apple seemed on the brink of shutting down in the late 1990s, it gave one of its co-founders, Steve Jobs, complete control, and Jobs returned the company to the edgy, colourful aesthetic visible in the 1984 ad. First came the iMac, in bright plastic cases; then the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Each replicates the total, swaddling control of the user experience and the enforced aesthetic values of the original Mac. Steve Jobs never concealed his opinion of Microsoft, and of Bill Gates: "nothing but the profoundest respect for his business acumen, and nothing but contempt for his taste". Apple, and Jobs, made cool a saleable commodity, and to do that they had to turn Windows, and Mr Gates, into the standard-bearers of uncool. And so they did, releasing advertisements that mocked Windows PC-users even as Mr Gates left Silicon Valley. And, with fortuitous timing for the iPhone and the iPad, the tech world has now swung back towards the makers of hardware; which is why Apple, a company that controls both hardware and software, remains on top.

It has now lost Steve Jobs' eye for detail, and his uncompromising aesthetic vision, however. Whether that was essential for the company's success remains to be seen; but it is true that Jobs' central conceit, that his hardware could only be top-of-the-line and his aesthetics must be paramount, is beginning to tell on the company's expansion plans. Samsung has come out of nowhere, armed with Google software, to become the strongest force in mobile computing outside North America. Worse, the legions of Apple fans locked into their worship of the closed Jobs aesthetic begin to oddly resemble the oppressed, brainwashed denizens of the original Macintosh advertisement. In many ways, the 30 years of the Mac changed how people see computing. But one thing has not changed. The dominant company is always vulnerable to a plucky, colourful challenger. It now seems that it is Apple that's on the big screen.