Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iconic Macintosh just celebrated its 40th anniversary with an iconic “1984” Super Bowl ad. While these are both extremely well known, what’s relatively less known is what happened in the run-up to the launch.
Macintosh had a huge impact on the personal computing industry thanks to its graphical user interface (GUI, which was now available to the masses at an affordable price.
Things Were About To Go Wrong
However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing, and Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs had to do something that was uncharacteristic to him at the time.
Apple was supposed to start shipping out the first Macintosh within a few days, which is when things began falling apart. The developers who were writing the code for the Macintosh said they couldn’t meet the deadline, according to a retelling of the events by Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson.
The engineers offered a compromise to placate Jobs and meet the deadline for an extremely important product launch for Apple after its struggles with the Lisa.
The idea was to send out initial shipments with software labeled “demo” and then replace them with the final version they expected to ship in the next two weeks.
However, Jobs, who was known for his temper by then, did not get angry. Instead, he sounded a somber note in what would come to define his “reality distortion field” for decades to come.
“You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. I’m going to ship the code a week from Monday, with your names on it.”
Apple shipped the Macintosh just in time, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Why It Matters: In retrospect, this was just another instance of Jobs believing in his team’s capabilities.
While Macintosh was not an out-and-out hit, it revolutionized the personal computing industry forever. Instead of requiring command-line knowledge, users could now use a mouse to use a computer.
Apple eventually sold 70,000 units in the first four months of Macintosh’s launch.
Jobs, known for his marketing genius, took the “1984” ad to turn the Orwellian vibe attached to it for something totally opposite…
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