The 1984 Apple Super Bowl Commercial: How Things Have Changed

In 1984, Apple was Apple, and the Super Bowl was the Super Bowl. Steve Jobs ran the commercial to introduce the Mac, and the Super Bowl was the place to introduce it. The theme of the ad was that the Mac would show how 1984 wouldn't be like 1984. How things have changed. Just for starters, the female hammer thrower in the ad would mow have to be a transsexual guy, just to show how woke Apple is.

But I have no reason to think ratings for this year's Super Bowl won't continue to reflect declining interest in the game, what with narcissistic, ultra-privileged, multimillionaire players taking a knee during the anthem mostly just to insult the fans for being racists.

Beyond that, Apple's changed. Jobs launched the Think Different campaign in 1997, a generation ago. "[H]e claimed specifically that 'you always had to be a little different to buy an Apple computer.'" Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if Apple still even sells computers. It sells phones with computers in them, but the product now is simply mass market music and entertainment. Nobody buys Apple to think different.

In fact, Apple's now Big Tech. It participates in cancel culture, dropping products like Parler from its app store if in fact they do anything actually to encourage such a trend as thinking different. Jobs's widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is described by Wikipedia as

an American billionaire heiress, businesswoman, executive and the founder of Emerson Collective, an organization that, among other investing and philanthropic activities, advocates for policies concerning education reform, social redistribution and environmental conservation.

This lady does anything but think different, and in fact she wants everyone else to think just like her.

And the Super Bowl has been changing for some time. Back in 2001 -- with Think Different, this was a generation ago -- Snopes.com had to debunk a claim from 1993 that Super Bowl Sunday was the biggest day of the year for spousal abuse.

The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against women” is a case study of how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as “fact” even when there is little or no supporting evidence behind it.

But that this would be such a credible fantasy suggests that the Super Bowl played a much greater role in the national consciousness than it does now. I think it's related in a peculair way to the current hysterical notion that Super Bowl parties could become COVID superspreader events, with the CDC issuing detailed guidelines for parties to prevent such n occurrence,

Except that I don't believe anyone has, ever, identified any single COVID superspreader event, despite clains that anything from choir practice to Trump rallies to Thanksgiving dinners could be such. But LA County is convinced that if restaurants allow TVs to broadcast the game, everyone'll start cheering and spewing droplets.

This is, in many ways, an indication of how much has changed, and how far out of touch our elites have become. c

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