I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
This is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably.
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
Thanks for pointing that out. The real ad appeared in the computer magazine Interface Age, September 1976 page 13, as can be seen in the Internet Archive. I think it's important for Hacker News to avoid fake/replica historical info so it doesn't end up like Reddit, where you can't trust anything.
It descended into glitch-ass slop towards the end, which I found funny. Very telling of an LLM/VLM since OCR would print straight garbage if it can't map a glyph to text.
This is actually a great example of why domain knowledge is important.
The printed ad is much easier to read despite the text being more densely-packed. This is because the LLM extraction stripped formatting (including the bolded and italicized text that directs readers towards interesting factoids) and used a system font and size (which is inconsistent and, often times, harder to read in column form) while the ad used a print appropriate serif that is consistent and easy to read on paper.
I'd like to think that this is graphic design 101, but when LLMs are threatening creative jobs en masse...not great.
But not to worry! All of the LLMs will nail this tomorrow after the ad's been RLHF'ed appropriately. minitruth doesn't sleep!
1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).
And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.
And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends.
You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.
> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
I don't how it was when Apple was a start-up, but I have never considered macOS or Apple Office suites as "free" or cheap - the way I rationalised purchasing an Apple device was by telling myself that Apple hardwares are overpriced because it includes the price of the accompanying software. Of course, now, as Apple slowly shifts to a hybrid subscription model, you will of course be continually paying for Apple software ...
They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.
I was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For me, personal computing didn't become truly affordable until the Commodore 64 came along in the 80s, and by that point the Apple II was about 4x more expensive. The Apple computers were revolutionary, but to me they have never been affordable.
A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.
In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today.
Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.
Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.
The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription.
I appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
The Apple I computers got bought back by Apple for the release of the Apple II. That's why they're so rare, Apple wanted them gone. They were not a user-friendly computer. It booted to the Monitor prompt, and did not include BASIC in the ROM.
I know people are rightly amazed by Woz’s engineering prowess, but it’s fascinating to see Steve’s fingerprints all of Apple I. Look at the product commitments and they’ll ring a bell:
- It’s all in one
- Hassle free to set up
- Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works
They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
[+] [-] dlcarrier|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] rendaw|1 month ago|reply
> use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer at any one time.
Note that you do have to be careful not to stack multiple Macbooks when you do this.
[+] [-] bryogenic|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] teaearlgraycold|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] virtualritz|1 month ago|reply
Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc.
Why not use an image of the original instead? [1]
Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :]
[1] https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-an-advertisement-for-the-a...
[+] [-] kens|1 month ago|reply
https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge197609/page/12/mode/...
[+] [-] jibal|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Anthony-G|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] nunez|1 month ago|reply
This is actually a great example of why domain knowledge is important.
The printed ad is much easier to read despite the text being more densely-packed. This is because the LLM extraction stripped formatting (including the bolded and italicized text that directs readers towards interesting factoids) and used a system font and size (which is inconsistent and, often times, harder to read in column form) while the ad used a print appropriate serif that is consistent and easy to read on paper.
I'd like to think that this is graphic design 101, but when LLMs are threatening creative jobs en masse...not great.
But not to worry! All of the LLMs will nail this tomorrow after the ad's been RLHF'ed appropriately. minitruth doesn't sleep!
[+] [-] rpastuszak|1 month ago|reply
I opened HN just now because:
1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because
2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because
3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).
And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.
I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!
* (sunk cost fallacy)
[+] [-] candiddevmike|1 month ago|reply
And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
[+] [-] echelon|1 month ago|reply
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends.
You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.
[+] [-] epistasis|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] pcl|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] zahlman|1 month ago|reply
?
[+] [-] zweifuss|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|1 month ago|reply
> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
[+] [-] thisislife2|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] titzer|1 month ago|reply
"Growing software library" it ain't.
[+] [-] ece|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] vertnerd|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] wlesieutre|1 month ago|reply
Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
[+] [-] Perenti|1 month ago|reply
Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.
The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
[+] [-] divbzero|1 month ago|reply
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-n...
[+] [-] cellover|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Foobar8568|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] TheJoeMan|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|1 month ago|reply
"APPLE Computer Compagny"
"Palo Atlt"
[+] [-] Dwedit|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] gignico|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxPock|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcwinn|1 month ago|reply
- It’s all in one - Hassle free to set up - Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works
They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
[+] [-] yashasolutions|1 month ago|reply
Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with the years...
[+] [-] PlatoIsADisease|1 month ago|reply
>If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page today
>If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today.
If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it might make setbacks feel better.