Forty years later, the first Macintosh in numbers

The first macintoshes, released on January 24, 1984, turns 40 years old. Here is a retrospective of the figures related to this technological antiquity of Manzanawhich, ahead of its time, paved the way for modern computers.

The Macintosh, a compact computer with a screen and floppy drive, democratized the computer thanks to an interface that allowed users to simply click on the icons with a mouse, a device from the 1960s and which the Mac made widespread.

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Before, only those in the know had access to computers, which obeyed complicated command lines.

1984

The first Macintosh was launched on the market with great fanfare.

On January 22, 1984, two days before its launch, the Apple computer made its appearance at one of the most followed events in the world: the Super Bowl, the final of the American football championship, watched that year by 77.6 million. of viewers according to the Nielsen group, specialized in audience measurement.

The 60-second ad, called “1984” and directed by Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner”), was inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” with a screen representing “Big Brother” – and competitor IBM – destroyed by an athlete dressed in Apple colors.

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The bitten apple brand, under the impetus of its co-founder Steve Jobs, paid $800,000 ($2.5 million today) for the advertising space, in addition to hundreds of thousands for the production of the video, according to the book “Apple Confidential.” 2.0″ by Owen Linzmayer.

$2,495

The first Macintosh was a luxury product. It was sold on January 24, 1894 in the United States for $2,495, about $7,400 today, but its price quickly decreased to $2,195.

The Mac was more affordable than its main competitor, the IBM PC, which then cost $3,270 (10,000 today), but it was twice as expensive as the Apple II, the brand’s then-entry-level best-seller.

Today, original MAC computers fetch 2,000 euros (almost $2,200) at auction. And the internal documents of its presentation dated October 1983, even more highly valued by collectors, exceeded $12,000 in 2022 at RR Auction.

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370,000 sales

Apple expected to sell 250,000 Macintoshes in 1984, the New York Times reported in April of that year. Although the official figures are secret, the brand would have sold 372,000 in the first year, in addition to a million Apple IIs, according to Jeremy Reimer, a technology history blogger.

These figures, commendable at a time when computers had not yet been democratized, are 15 times more modest than current sales of Apple computers.

The Cupertino (California) group will sell around 22 million (MacBook, iMac…) in 2023, according to the consulting firms Gartner and IDC. With between 8% and 9% of global sales, Apple is in fourth place after Lenovo, HP and Dell.

9 inches

The screen of the first Mac, much smaller than the current ones, was 9 inches, about 23 cm diagonally.

By comparison, the latest iMacs offer a 23.5-inch (60 cm) screen and some MacBook laptops have 16 inches (41 cm).

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At 34.5 cm high, 24.4 cm wide and 27.7 cm deep, the first Mac could, despite its 7.5 kg weight, be taken “anywhere, even on a plane,” according to an AFP dispatch from January 1984.

128 kB

The first Mac had 128 kB of RAM, that is, about 131,000 bytes. 128 kB is, for example, the size of a low-resolution photo or a very small Excel file.

Today, very few computers have less than 8 GB (8.6 billion bytes) of RAM, and Apple’s most powerful, the Mac Pro, has up to 1.6 million times more RAM (192 GB) than its predecessor. .

RAM allows the computer to temporarily store data needed to perform a task. The larger the memory, the more complex and simultaneous tasks the computer can perform.

Source: Elcomercio

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