- 40 years ago today, the very first Macintosh (now often referred to as the Mac) appeared.
- A revolution for the world of computing, which Apple managers decided to introduce during the prestigious halftime of the Super Bowl.
- A true luxury product with characteristics and performances that today seem obsolete, this first Apple model launched the beginnings of the company’s success.
A compact object integrating a screen and a floppy disk drive, the Macintosh has democratized the computer. Thanks to an interface allowing you to simply click on icons with a mouse, the use of this device, dating from the 1960s, has been widespread across the Mac by the Apple company. Until then, only initiates had access to computers, which responded to complicated command lines.
The launch of the first Macintosh took place with great fanfare. On January 22, 1984, two days before its release, he attended one of the most watched events in the world, the Super Bowl, the final of the American football championship, watched that year by 77.6 million people. viewers according to the Nielsen group, specializing in audience measurement.
A launch at 2.5 million euros
The 60-second commercial, called “1984” and directed by Ridley Scott (“Alien”, “Blade Runner”), is inspired by the world of George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name, with a screen representing “Big Brother” – and the competitor IBM – smashed by a sports car in Apple colors.
Pushed by its co-founder Steve Jobsthe Apple brand paid $800,000 ($2.5 million today) to secure a slot during the Super Bowl, in addition to hundreds of thousands spent to produce the ad, according to Owen’s book “Apple Confidential 2.0.” Linzmayer.
A starting price of 2,495 dollars
The first Macintosh was marketed on January 24, 1984 in the United States at a price of 2,495 dollars, or nearly 7,400 dollars today (6,700 euros). Its price will drop quickly to $2,195.
The Mac is more affordable than its main competitor, the IBM PC, which cost $3,270 at the time (currently $10,000, €8,800), but it is twice as expensive as the Apple II, then a best-seller. entry level of the brand.
Today, original Macs fetch up to 2,000 euros at auction. Even more popular with collectors, internal Macintosh presentation documents, dated October 1983, exceeded $12,000 in 2022 at RR Auction.
Record sales
Apple hoped to sell 250,000 Macintoshes in 1984 according to New York Times in April 1984. If the official figures are secret, the brand would have ultimately sold 372,000 in the first year, to which is added a million Apple IIs, according to Jeremy Reimer, blogger on the history of tech.
Honorable at a time when the computer was not yet democratized, these figures are 15 times more modest than Apple computer sales today. The Cupertino (California) group sold nearly 22 million of them in 2023 (MacBook, iMac, etc.), according to Gartner and IDC. With 8% to 9% of global sales, Apple ranks fourth behind Lenovo, HP and Dell.
Small and practical
Far from today’s giant screens, that of the first Mac is 9 inches, or approximately 23 cm diagonal. In comparison, the latest iMacs offer a 23.5 inch (60 cm) screen, with some portable MacBooks reaching 16 inches (41 cm).
34.5 cm high, 24.4 cm wide and 27.7 cm deep, the first Mac can, despite its 7.5 kg, “be taken anywhere, even on a plane,” according to an AFP report. dating from January 1984.
128 KB RAM (only)
The first Mac has 128 KB of RAM, or approximately 131,000 bytes. 128 KB is for example the size of a low definition photo or a very small Excel file.
Today, there are few computers with less than 8 GB (8.6 billion bytes) of RAM and Apple’s most powerful computer, the Mac Pro, has up to 1.6 million times more RAM (192 GB) than its ancestor.
RAM allows the computer to temporarily store the data needed to complete a task. The higher it is, the more complex and simultaneous tasks the computer can perform.