1984 Macintosh commercial runs during the Super Bowl. You’re watching Apple position itself as the counterculture smashing IBM’s dominance. You look at your devices today: they’re all Apple. The company that threw the sledgehammer built the screen everyone stares at now. How did the rebel become the empire it promised to destroy?

Why didn’t the commercial show the product? Levy explains that selling philosophy over features was revolutionary for tech advertising. The Mac introduced clicking instead of typing commands, pictures instead of code, accessibility instead of expertise. But philosophy doesn’t pay bills: the computer cost $7,500 in today’s money and failed commercially for over a decade. Only Jobs’s return with the iMac in the late 1990s rescued the company from irrelevance.

We lost the counterculture somewhere between 1984 and now. Every device uses the same platforms. Every person subscribes to the same services. Big Tech companies, including Apple, occupy the monolithic position IBM held when that sledgehammer flew. Next time you see that commercial: remember it wasn’t predicting the future, it was describing a moment that already passed.

Topics: 1984 Macintosh commercial, Apple counterculture, technology democratization, Big Tech dominance, privacy concerns

GUEST:Carmi Levy | Technology analyst and journalist

Originally aired on2026-01-22