Vintage Apple ad Flickr stream

How far Apple has come. Where now their advertisements are peopled with the cream of America's ample smugness crop — the silhouettes of hipsters flinging razor-thin laptops back and forth between one another like impossibly gorgeous doofuses playing frisbee with shurikens — it was once just a greasy, bleary-eyed middle manager in a cheap, crumpled suit, dripping 40 proof sweat upon a machine with the same density as an original volume of St. Augustine's City of God printed in dark matter. He's doing finances, but the sordid luster of his eyes make it clear he is, right that moment, dreaming of the creation of Usenet's alt.rectal-insertion newsgroup. This was the customer Apple wanted then.

Bonus: the ad's lede, which seems to suggest that, when everyone's left the office for the day, an Apple I is pretty good for fucking.

A lot more vintage Apple ads at this Flickr group.

Vintage Mac Ads [Flickr via Cult of Mac]

[#1 posted by icky2000 , December 18, 2008 6:36 AM]

Correction: the ad refers to the Apple II, not the Apple I. Still sexy.

[#2 posted by Roger Strong , December 18, 2008 3:21 PM]

Ah, the Apple Lisa.

It was available with Apple's first Unix-based OS: Microsoft XENIX, from when Microsoft was still a Unix shop.

XENIX had some interesting enhancements (multiple virtual consoles, record-locking facilities for database programming, user-friendly menus, etc). A guy named Linus much later essentially replicated all the major design decisions that Microsoft put into XENIX but using an independent codebase. You could call Microsoft the "grandfather" of Linux, in a Darth Vader / Luke Skywalker sort of way.

[#3 posted by Shrdlu , December 18, 2008 3:27 PM]

But where do they spell "lead" as "lede?"

[#4 posted by Joel Johnson , December 18, 2008 3:34 PM]

@Shrdlu: In publishing!

[#5 posted by Shrdlu , December 18, 2008 7:50 PM]

Joel: Well, I realize that but I though "lede" and "led" had gone the way of the dodo after the advent of DTP.

[#6 posted by wookiehangover , December 18, 2008 9:59 PM]

I've been using vintage apple ads as my desktop background for my macbook for a while now...nice to see another good source for them!

[#7 posted by cyberjack , December 19, 2008 3:12 PM]

What's missing here is the VERY FIRST Apple advert - for the Apple 1

It cost $666.66 - only about 200 were ever built and sold.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberjackandsweetie/3121576780/