Early unaired Mac ad even more smug and obnoxious than reviled ‘Genius’ ads [video]
Apple’s (AAPL) history of creating advertisements featuring smug, cocky “geniuses” goes back well before the recent “Genius” ads and even before the old-school “Mac-versus-PC” ads. In spite of the company’s history, 9to5Mac has found that current Google (GOOG) software engineer and Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld has posted a video on his Google+ page showing an unaired Mac ad from 1983 that was deemed “too self-congratulatory” for humans to stomach.
The ad features several Apple engineers positively gushing about their own work and gives them hilariously self-important titles such as “Hardware Wizard” to show viewers just how “magical” the Macintosh is.
“Demonstrating a Macintosh is the only way to do it,” said then-Apple engineer Bill Atkinson during the ad. “I can’t really describe it to you in words, but if I can get you to sit in front of it and play with it, you won’t let go of it.”
A young Hertzfeld himself piped up at the end of the ad to say that Apple’s wizards “were just trying to make something incredibly great… and I think we did!”
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