An interactive CD-ROM. In the early '90s, it was the perfect holiday gift---if you could actually get the thing to work.
That's the story laid down by this classic holiday ad (see above). It's Christmas Eve, and a typical American couple is struggling to install some sort of CD-based software they hope to unload on their kids the next day. They pore over one of those massive computer manuals. They hack away at the machine's command line. But nothing seems to work.
"Maybe we got the wrong installation program," the man says. "Maybe we bought the wrong computer," his wife answers.
Yes, it's an Apple commercial, though Apple products are never mentioned. "If you're looking for a multimedia computer that actually works, there's really only one way to go," a narrator intones, before an Apple logo appears on the screen.
It was a typical play from the maker of the Macintosh. Instead of focusing on all things a Mac could do, the ad highlights what you don't want out of a computer. It's like the company's iconic 1984 ad and the Apple Switch campaign from the early 2000s and the more recent "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" series. And it's not at all like those jolly old Christmas commercials from 90s computer companies like IBM, which tried to sell us on the all the things computers could do:
The "us vs. them" mentality helped build Apple's cult following for a good thirty years, but these days, it's a different story. Apple is now at the top of the tech heap, and it runs ads like this:
In other words, Apple is now the IBM of our times.
