"Too Costly? How about you take it for a test drive?"-APPLE's TEST DRIVE A MACINTOSH campaign from the mid 1980s

When APPLE released their MACINTOSH 128k Computer to the masses on JANUARY 24 1984,

The company was expecting this product to CHANGE everything we knew about COMPUTERS by  FIERCELY telling people to abandon the COMMAND interface and embrace the GUI.

While it did entice people,

Not many people were sold on the MAC 128K at first.

One of the major reasons was it's price: US$2495.

Why pay that much money for a new COMPUTER that's mostly a GUI when you already have a COMMODORE 64,

Atari 800XL,

or even APPLE's own good ole APPLE IIE system

that's already doing the things you need?

Even an IBM PC Clone was really all you need at the time.....

Undaunted, APPLE, under the tenure of JOHN SCULLY,

decided to run a series of ADs:

That was a generic commercial featuring a MOUSE disguised as a CAR to emphasis the TEST DRIVE nature of CAR DEALERSHIPS.....

Essentially what the commercial was going for was that yes, APPLE knew they price their computers higher than other companies but we all know that APPLE's known for refusing to lower down the price because not only does that guarantee lower profit margins but it also means selling the machines at a loss which APPLE obviously doesn't want to do.

So to let people know about their computer's capabilities without having to upsell on the higher cost, the dealers can let users test drive the computer for a day or two before returning it to the dealer until the user is ready to cough up the $2500 dollars needed to buy a MAC in 1984.

Such confidence from APPLE in the mid-1980s.

There's also a series of TEST DRIVE A MACINTOSH commercial that.... just watch:

(This one is my personal favorite)

Anyway, what some of these commercials signify is that APPLE thinks people are one day going to get so frustrated with COMMAND PROMPTS that they'll chuck their CGA monitors out the window or into a wall and seriously consider buying a MACINTOSH.

That's a little....... unrealistic in the reaction but what it does mirror is the frustration DOS users have with trying to free up CONVENTIONAL MEMORY in their computers

Fighting with Conventional Memory is something that has ceased by the time WINDOWS 95 showed up around the corner in AUGUST 1995.

I've heard APPLE dealers hated the TEST DRIVE campaign as to them, it hurts their business as well as rough handling of the test units, especially when their supply were insufficient for demand.

Nonetheless, the MACINTOSH 128k sold pretty well to a point that it outsold the infamous IBM PCJR computer......

Though later in 1984, APPLE would have fierce competition rising from another company and one that's been at APPLE's mercy since 1977

But that's a story for another time.