How much would Apple’s first Mac, launched 40 years ago, sell for today?

The first Macintoshlaunched on January 24, 1984, is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Here is a retrospective of the figures related to this technological antiquity. Applewhich, ahead of its time, paved the way for modern computers. The Macintosh, a compact computer with a screen and a floppy disk drive, democratized the computer thanks to an interface that allowed users to simply click on icons with a mouse, a device from the 1960s that the Mac made widespread. Before then, only experts had access to computers, which followed complicated command lines.

1984

The first Macintosh was launched to great fanfare. On January 22, 1984, two days before its launch, the Apple computer made its appearance at one of the most followed events in the world: the Super Bowl,the final of the American football championship, watched that year by 77.6 million viewers according to the Nielsen group, which specializes in audience measurement.

He 60-second advertisement, called “1984” and directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner), was inspired by the dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell, with a screen depicting “Big Brother” – and competitor IBM – smashed by a sportswoman dressed in Apple colours.

The bitten apple brand, under the impetus of its co-founder Steve Jobs, paid $800,000 (2.5 million in today’s dollars) for the advertising space,plus hundreds of thousands for the production of the video, according to the book Apple Confidential 2.0 de Owen Linzmayer.

$2,495

The first Macintosh was a luxury product. It was sold on January 24, 1894 in the United States for $2,495, about $7,400 today.but its price quickly dropped to $2,195.

The Mac was more affordable than its main competitor, the IBM PC, which then cost $3,270 ($10,000 today), but was twice as expensive as the Apple II, the brand’s then-entry-level best-seller.

Today, original Mac computers fetch nearly $2,200 at auction. And internal documents from its introduction dated October 1983, even more sought after by collectors, surpassed $12,000 in 2022 at RR Auction.

370,000 sales

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

These figures, which are impressive at a time when computers had not yet become democratized, are 15 times smaller than Apple’s current sales of computers.

The Cupertino (California) group sold around 22 million (MacBook, iMac…) in 2023, according to the consultancies Gartner and IDC. With between 8% and 9% of global sales, Apple is in fourth place after Lenovo, HP and Dell.

9 inches

The The screen of the first Mac, much smaller than the current ones, was 9 inchesabout 23 cm diagonally. By comparison, the latest iMacs offer a 23.5-inch (60 cm) screen and some MacBook laptops have 16 inches (41 cm). At 34.5 cm high, 24.4 cm wide and 27.7 cm deep, The first Mac, despite its 7.5 kg weight, could be taken “anywhere, even on a plane”according to an AFP report from January 1984.

128 kB

The first Mac It had 128 kB of RAM, or about 131,000 bytes. 128 kB is, for example, the size of a low-resolution photo. or a very small Excel file. Nowadays, Very few computers have less than 8 GB (8.6 billion bytes) of RAM, and Apple’s most powerful Mac, the Mac Pro, has up to 1.6 million times more RAM (192 GB) than its predecessor.

RAM 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.

“The Nation” from Argentina / GDA