Forty years ago, the upstart computer company Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial symbolically aligned the company with the resistance of the human spirit to the mechanistic forces of conformity.
Today, the company—now a $3 trillion global goliath — has sparked a blowback with an ad that seems to do just the opposite. If the ad wasn’t intended to illustrate how Apple risks becoming the villain of its own hero myth, the reaction to it sure does.
