Apple's '1984' Super Bowl ad debuts the Macintosh
On this day · 22 January 1984
A sixty-second mini-film cast the personal computer as a hammer thrown at conformity, and changed Super Bowl advertising forever.
On January 22, 1984, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, Apple aired a single sixty-second commercial and never paid for a national showing of it again. Directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off Blade Runner, the spot borrowed the gray dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: rows of shaven-headed drones staring at a giant talking screen.
A lone athlete in bright shorts sprints in and hurls a sledgehammer through the screen, which explodes in light. The tagline promised that on January 24th Apple would introduce the Macintosh, “and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
The ad named no product features and barely showed the machine. What it sold was an attitude, casting the new computer as a rebel against an unnamed, IBM-shaped establishment.
It is widely credited with turning the Super Bowl ad break into the most coveted real estate on television.
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