The images featured are from the new iPod lineup introduced in the September of 2009.

All images are © and courtesy of Apple.

The use of typography is a mainstay of Apple which has used it since the early Eighties to market products and most of all its brand. The ad for the Lombard PowerBook (also known as “Bronze Keyboard”) takes the use of typgraphy even further marrying the images of the laptop witha series of words in many languages (actually the same word and/or concept) alternating and speeding towards the viewer.

This style will be later used not only in promoting the follow-up, the PowerBook Pismo, but will also be part of all the intros to Apple’s operating systems.

In the 1999 ad “slim” and “slank” were Apple’s key words, still set in Apple Garamond as would the similar Mac OS 9 intro.
The last of the “classic” Mac OS also started the “Welcome” ritual which has been used (so far) in all of the Mac OS X intros since 2001 although set in the Lucida Sans and from 10.4 with an added 3D effect.

The ad, which was then broadcast in a shortened 30 seconds version, borrowed the core of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and its dystopian future under a “Big Brother”, unanimously perceived as an allusion to IBM, Apple’s adversary on the market.

Altough most sources mention the january date, the broadcasting history of the ad is actually quite rich and complex.

Starting on 17 January it was screened prior to previews in movie theaters for a few weeks and before that, it was aired publicly on television on the night of 15 December 1983 by KMVT in Idaho. This was a clever move by the advertising agency, Chiat/Day, so that “1984″ could be submitted to award ceremonies for that year.

Before that, on the 20th of October 1983, Ridley Scott’s visionary masterpiece promoting the Mac was shown during Apple’s annual sales conference in Honolulu to “a rapturous reception, almost as apocalyptic as the commercial itself”.

To make the point more clear here are more examples, taken from a very wide spectrum of Apple products, strategies and eras.

During its’ thirty year the Cupertino company has conceived, produced and release an incredible amount of products and strategies but has been incredibly consistent in its imagery. Be it the need to explain the workings of the mouse, to show the very small footprint of its computers on the desktop or the reduced thickness of a player, the professional results one can get, the revolutionary interfaces or just how easy the networking is, Infinite Loop’s “hands on” and extremely personal approach is unmistakable and very clear from the iconography of Apple’s ads throughout its history.

Immages taken from Applicando, www.guidebookgallery.org and “courtesy of Apple”.