Forty years later, the first Macintosh in numbers – 01/22/2024 – Tech

The first Macintosh, launched on January 24, 1984, turns 40 this Wednesday (24). Ahead of its time, Apple’s technological relic paved the way for modern computers.

The compact device with a screen and floppy disk drive democratized computing thanks to an interface that allowed users to simply click icons with a mouse, a 1960s device popularized by the Mac.

Previously, only experts 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 in 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, which specializes in audience measurement.

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

The bitten-apple brand, driven by its co-founder Steve Jobs, paid $800,000 ($2.5 million in today’s dollars) for the advertising space, plus hundreds of thousands for video production, 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, 1984 in the United States for US$2,495, about US$7,400 in today’s values, but its price quickly decreased to US$2,195.

The Mac was more affordable than its main competitor, IBM’s PC, which at the time cost $3,270 ($10,000 in today’s money) but was double the price of the Apple II, the brand’s entry-level bestseller in era.

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

370 thousand

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

These numbers, impressive for a time when computers had not yet become popular, are 15 times more modest than current sales of Apple computers.

The Cupertino (California) group sold around 22 million (MacBooks, iMacs…) in 2023, according to consultancies Gartner and IDC. With a market share of between 8% and 9%, Apple occupies fourth place, behind Lenovo, HP and Dell.

9 inches

The first Mac’s screen, much smaller than today’s, was 9 inches, about 23 cm diagonally.

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

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

128 kB

The first Mac had 128 kB of RAM (131 thousand bytes). The figure represents, for example, the size of a low-resolution photo or a very small Excel spreadsheet.

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

RAM memory 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.